Each political note has its own anchor in case you
want to link to it.

My intention is to make links only to publicly accessible, stable
URLs. If you find a link to a page that requires subscription,
please report that as you would report any other broken link.

Some sites have paper tiger paywalls that can be defeated by deleting
a cookie. I don't post links to those sites because it would be
too complex to tell users what to do to avoid having to identify
themselves.

"Free trade" policies such as the WTO undermine democracy, both indirectly (by allowing companies to threaten to move their business elsewhere if states regulate them as they ought to be regulated) and directly (with lots of rulings such as this). All these treaties need to be cancelled so that we can restore democracy.

Persecuting the homeless is kicking the weak while they are down. There are bigger evils in the US, but none more mean-spirited. The demand for such policies comes largely from stores. People should identify the stores in their neighborhood that advocate such policies, and boycott them.

It would be correct to take appropriate action so that lion poaching
does not take off. Perhaps the sale of lion bones should be banned,
but I'm not sure: that ban might encourage poaching by removing the
existing legal source. In any case, I can't bring my self to say that
I want to recommend tourism to South Africa. That is because it
generally involves long-distance flights.

Demand-reduction through education of the users seems like a good
approach here. Repeat users of illegal mind-effecting drugs at least
know that they have a real effect. The users of these phony drugs are
only imagining an effect. They should try viagra instead — then
they would get their money's worth. If they don't know this, we
should inform them.

I heard about a video designed to drive Chinese men off the
superstitious idea that tiger bone, lion bone, or whatever absurd
irrelevant thing, would be effective as a virility medicine. It
showed tigers having sex, which does not take very long, and said
something like, "Using tiger bone you can last a whole ten seconds."
Why not play this on TV ten times a day all across China?

The goal is clear: a system of total surveillance that would be great for repression of democracy. As for crime, I doubt this will be of any use for preventing the most widespread and damaging crimes, such as foreclosure fraud or the purchase of laws that hurt millions of workers.

This is correct, but Bahrain must above all stop its repression of
protests. Amnesty International that Bahrain arrested an 11-year-old
kid and bullied him into confessing crimes which are just a way of
saying "protesting", and he now faces imprisonment.

Of course, what's even more frightening is what the state will do to dissidents with all the data it has. While real non-state-sponsored terrorists do exist, the state itself is a much bigger danger to us and our freedom if its violence is not kept in check.

Perhaps some country (it does not matter which) should begin bombing fossil fuel power plants and oil refineries around the world. Even if this war caused a million deaths, that would be hundreds of millions fewer deaths than climate disaster would cause. To be sure, this solution is unnecessarily violent and drastic, since a treaty could do the job and do it better; but governments refuse to sign such a treaty, so what's left to do?

This represents nasty priorities, but more fundamentally, the question arises as a result of a misguided policy: linking medical care with employment. The US government should bypass this issue by funding medical care with taxes — for everyone, whether employed or not.

Note the non-sequitur reason offered by Sprint: "We won't tell you
your location data, because we're not allowed to tell you some other
data." I don't believe they expect this nonsense to fool their customers. Rather, they expect that they will never be called to account for the irrationality.

Whether you can find out your own past locations is not the real issue. The real issue is that companies store them and will report on you. Being able to see how much information they store about you is indirectly relevant, because if you could see it, you might not stand for it.

I wonder if a state government could legally require phone companies to hand over this information to subscribers.

A simple model using yeast shows how a stressed population can reach a tipping point and collapse irreversibly.

Attempts at fisheries management that fail to take account of this possibility are likely to fail disastrously — and since we cannot determine where the tipping point lies, we need to be a lot more cautious.

US citizens: phone your congresscritter to oppose attempts to roll back Obama's health care reform. Also use this page to send a message:

Here's the text I entered:

As your constituent, I urge you to oppose any further attempts to
repeal or restrict this important law. The only change that should be
made is to reduce our health care costs by establishing a single-payer
system as in Canada. The parasitic health care companies, which
secretly lobbied against this law while saying they were in favor of
it, ought to be removed once and for all from our economy.
Thank you.

The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.

This law was a step forward in terms of health care coverage. The bad things about it are that it won't save any costs, because it fails to remove the grip of the health coverage companies and big pharma.

The minister says the government "will" offer the evicted refugees new homes — in other words, at some time in the future, not now. I am sure these poor Haitians know exactly what a promise like that from the Haitian elite is worth.

One idiot criticized the government for not putting out the fire sooner. Clearly the firefighters are doing all they can. What the government should have done sooner is stop the process of roasting our planet.

Mondragon is an alternative to the stockholder corporation as a way of organizing business, but we must distinguish that from free markets. The word "capitalism", used to refer to the two of them at once, obscures the point.

The next time Big Brother decides to bug your house it could be done with a flying robot bug.

Present trends suggest that the US will strew these literally everywhere, record all conversations in a complete behavioral dossier for each person, and argue about whether a warrant is required to listen to the recordings days or years later.

These developments demonstrate that the basic logic of US privacy law
is inadequate. If it is acceptable to take note occasionally that a
car or person passes by, that doesn't make it acceptable to collect a
large dossier on every car's movements, or every person's.

I will not campaign to keep inefficient coal mines running, or even efficient ones. However, the state has the duty to make sure closing them does not force miners and their families onto the street.

Under Spanish law, the miners will have to pay their mortgages even if they lose their houses. Since nobody will buy houses in a ghost town, the seizure of their houses will hardly reduce their debt. Even if they could find other work, unlikely in today's Spain, they could hardly support their families and pay the mortgages on the lost homes.

They may thus be forced to join the thousands of "fiscally dead" who can only work in the underground economy, because any legally recognized earnings would be directed towards debts they can never pay.

This article from 2010 says that Lugo also bowed to the multinational
land grab and didn't defend the peasants who voted for him.
However, if the senate was against him, he may not have been in a position
to defend them alone.

Look at how the US government argues that it's ok for DEA agents to put a gun to a child's head.

Aside the outrageous arguments and the factual falsehoods, worst of all is the reprehensible moral distortion. To refer to grabbing a person (child or adult) and throwing that person on the floor as "assisting that person to the floor" must not be tolerated; everyone responsible for making that statement should be fired for it.

Meanwhile, even though the mistake of raiding the wrong house might not be anyone's fault, why shouldn't the state compensate the victims for the lasting terror caused by this raid? Even in Afghanistan the US compensates victims when it admits it attacked the wrong people.

This seems to have been political, like the attempt to remove Bill Clinton from office. Whether it is really a disaster for democracy in Paraguay, I don't know enough to judge. I don't know enough about him and the situation in Paraguay to come to any conclusion.

He was interested in free software, and his aides invited me to Paraguay three times, each time saying he wanted to meet with me, but each time some other urgent issues arose and made him too busy. Since every "LUG" is really a GLUG, I wanted to ask him to change his name to Glugo ;-).

This makes me concerned that systems will read fingerprints without our knowing. We may have to wear pads over our fingers in public to prevent this.

The article claims that these systems will not be connected to the FBI's fingerprint database, but that is beyond their control. Under the U SAP AT RIOT Act, the FBI can collect all these fingerprints from any company at any time.

I don't see any special controversy about using drones bombers in a war zone where artillery or manned bombers might otherwise have been used. Drones can kill civilians, but so can the artillery or manned bombers. The issue here is when drones are used outside such areas, in what fits the concept of assassination more than that of war.

There is nothing wrong with promoting homosexuality, but more than that, arbitrarily banning an organization without a fair trial violates freedom of association. The US also engages in such arbitrary bans, which are equally wrong.

Israeli and international women dressed protested in Shuhada Street, formerly the main shopping street of Hebron, which Israeli colonists have turned into a Jews-only zone. They were violently arrested.

This is the nonviolent action that Issa Amro was later accused of helping to organize.

Whether "cripple" in particular ought to be grounds for arrest is a side issue. the real issue is, this is entirely wrong. There is no word which is so nasty that people ought to get arrested for saying it.

Assange is wanted in Sweden for questioning, although there are no criminal charges against him as of now. Yet, when he offered to be questioned in the UK by Swedish officials, they did not take him up on it. UK judges twisted and stretched the law to permit extradition even without an order from a Swedish judge.

The crime that they want to question him about is not rape. According
to published explanations, his alleged actions
would not be a crime in
any other country. It is not nice conduct, to be sure, but that is
not the same as rape.

I have read that Sweden has an arrangement with the US whereby it
would hand him over to the US on a mere request. That would be a bad
thing.

It would be improper for Ecuador to shield Assange from possible sex
charges. I suggest that Ecuador invite Swedish officials to question
Assange in the embassy or in Ecuador. If he is subsequently charged
in Sweden, Ecuador could approve his extradition to Sweden on the
condition that Sweden not hand him over to the US, but rather let him
return to Ecuador if acquitted, or at the end of his sentence if he is
found guilty.

What convinced me this was done by Assad's men was the testimony
attributed to an army defector. I wonder if it is possible to
confront him with these claims.

I don't think that the Christian religious orders are implicitly trustworthy either. Assad protects them and they are afraid that Sunni fanatics will kill them. This could lead them to lie about massacres. At the same time, it reflects real danger from armed Sunni groups that have been supported by other countries.

The nonviolent protests of 2011 were nonsectarian. Assad wanted to turn it into a sectarian conflict, and outside Sunni states wanted the same thing. Now they have both got their gruesome wish.

The report fails to criticize the worst thing about Oakland's
response:
the fact that it shut down the Occupy encampment and led the wave
of attacks that eliminate the right to make protest camps in the US.

They surely did, but Obama helped them along by failing to campaign publicly for stimulus policies, or for tax increases on the rich. Obama even endorsed the goal of cutting the deficit during a recession.

A software patent is the immediate cause of this nastiness, but what
gave it the opportunity to do so is something even nastier: Apple's
unjust power over the iThings.

What put Apple in a position to decide whether her parents can get
this app? The system software of the iThings is malicious, set up to
let Apple decide what programs users can install. Apple practices
arbitrary censorship, and not just in this instance.

What put Apple in a position to remotely delete this app? Another
malicious feature, called a "back door", which is designed to let
Apple remotely delete installed apps.

The iThings are designed as jails for their users. Gilded jails, but
still jails. They were lured in by the gilding, but and now they see
the door shutting.

Meanwhile, suppose the company that made the app loses the lawsuit or
settles it with an agreement not to distribute that app. That too
would stop Maya from ever getting another copy. Why is this? Because
the program is _proprietary software_, controlled by that company and
not by its users.

What Maya really needs is to replace that program with
free/libre
software, software controlled by its users.

From what I've read, one small correction is called for: Al Qa'ida was set up by Pakistan's intelligence service to support the resistance against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, and was later turned to another purpose.

I am not sure what position to take on the immigration issue in general; I do not think countries are in general obliged to let everyone in. However, this policy is clearly right for those children who hardly know any other country.

The root of the problem are that taxes on these companies are too low. The government should take money from them to finance this research, so that the companies get no control or influence over the research.

The UK government is for fossil fuel and nuclear power, and opposed to renewable energy. It has weakened or canceled nearly all of Labour's programs to reduce CO2 emissions, but continues to pretend it is for renewable energy.

Peter Van Buren — being fired by the State Department for posting a link to a published Wikileaks document — writes about how Obama's persecution of whistleblowers is making the US like a military dictatorship he once lived in.

He warns us that the policy of "classify everything, then leak what makes the government look good" leads to a journalism which is effectively censored.

Australia's new marine reserves may not achieve their purpose due to exceptions made to cater to the fishing and mining companies.

You can see in the wheedling words of the prime minister why this happened. We can't protect nature (which means, human survival) and keep business happy at the same time. We need governments prepared to be as tough as Rambo toward any business that gets in the way of protecting the Earth.

If you take US rhetoric at face value, and suppose that the US government wants to wipe out al Qa'ida, this would imply that the drone attacks are a self-defeating tactic.

However, what if that is just a pretense and the real desire of the US government is to have a war it can fight forever? An excuse to eliminate civil liberties and reduce most Americans to abject poverty without opportunity? Judged this way, the drone attacks would be a great success.

The discussion of which data can be accessed under which conditions is a decoy from the real issue: the fundamental increase in surveillance which is going on: the policy of making a total dossier on each person.

The article confuses the proposed system with the patent. The proposed system is what matters. The patent has no effect on students, except that it might be an disincentive to implement the system. The only ethical issue about the patent itself is that it is a business method patent, which is a kind of software patent, and those should not exist.

What can we say about the proposed system? It involves corrupting schools, turning them into marketing agents for publishers. Any school that requires students to obtain a book in a specific way should be shut down.

I doubt that "child" pornography, even when it really depicts children and not postpuberal teenagers, plays a big role in leading people to sexually abuse children, because adults have done this for a long time even though porn was not available. In any case, the main risk to a child comes from people in the family.

So I think this is simply an example of a common political phenomenon: a phony solution that allows politicians to pretend they are doing something, while serving other interests (the copyright industry) and harming the public.

By contrast, governments rarely ignore the nasty copyright treaties they sign. I suspect that's because business power wants the copyright treaties obeyed while it sabotages the environmental treaties.

Osama bin Laden tried to continue directing Qa'ida, but its affiliate groups didn't listen to him, making him irrelevant to events.

This is more reason why his death was no real gain for the US.

He tried to focus the affiliate groups on attacking the US, but they instead focusing on attacking local enemies. Perhaps that's part of the reason why the danger to Americans from terrorism is so low as to be negligible. Americans are more likely to be killed by their own furniture.

Israel threatens to demolish the school of Jinba cave village in the West Bank, as well as the solar power facility and road. But teachers can't reach the village to teach, there because Israeli soldiers took their van.

The area was declared a zone for military exercises, apparently as an excuse to get rid of the village because it isn't really used as such.

Many states in the US have suppressed journalism about the treatment of farm animals by banning investigative reporters from lying on job applications. This means they cannot hide the fact that they are reporters.

Such harmless deception is legitimate and necessary in order to expose abuses by business.

20 years ago, the power of business was less, and governments could make agreements to protect the environment. Today that is impossible because business interests won't let states cede an inch. They will fight to the end over whatever scraps they don't manage to destroy in the process.

Billionaire Polluters have compelled scientists who did research into the effects of the Big Spill to hand over their private emails. The scientists fear these will be taken out of context, misinterpreted, and used to attack them.

I don't understand the logic of this decision, since the scientists were in no way involved in the events that caused the spill and therefore cannot be expected to have any special information about them.

Humanity's tremendous changes in the ocean mostly go unnoticed, because they are gradual. A book documents with photos how large fish were wiped out, across 30 years. It also shows how protecting fisheries can bring back stocks that are almost gone.

Although the details of fisheries management are complex, the basic idea is simple: give priority to the long term, and the fishermen must adapt to that.

Israel will not prosecute the orthodox rabbis who wrote that it is ok to kill Gentile children to stop them from growing up and killing Jews.

The author thinks that Israel's prohibition of "hate speech" is a good thing, and claims with regret that this decision has effectively made it null and void. I disagree, because that law is censorship. The wrong is not that religious speech is exempt from censorship, but that nonreligious speech is subject to censorship.

While I totally disagree with the views of these rabbis, just as I disagree with the cruel views of right-wing American politicians and Islamists, they all deserve the right to state their views.

Although this causes inconvenience for those whose tax refunds are delayed, it is good for the US as a whole because it puts money into the economy — just what the Republicans have blocked for two years.

What is unfortunate about this is that it encourages lying. It would be better to stimulate the economy by paying people to do useful public works.

Sam Harris made an exaggerated statement which nonetheless has a kernel of truth:

As bad as
Christianity and Judaism have been in the past (and may yet be again),
only Muslims reliably work themselves into a killing rage over the
mistreatment of a book; only Muslims murder their critics and
apostates; only Muslims can be counted upon to riot by the tens of
thousands over cartoons; and only Islam, with its doctrines of jihad
and martyrdom, is perfectly suited to spawn a global death cult of
suicidal terrorists.

The statement is quite an exaggeration. For instance, Muslims in general don't reliably work themselves into a killing rage about mistreatment of a book, or anything else; in fact, most of them never do any such thing. Properly stated, the point is that Islam is the only religion which reliably leads substantial numbers of adherents to into a killing rage about that.

Likewise, "only Muslims murder their critics" is misleading since most Muslims don't murder anyone. It must be replaced with, "Only Islam regularly motivates some adherents to murder its critics." Christianity may not be far behind, though, since it regularly motivates some adherents to murder doctors and condemn pregnant women to death from curable medical problems.

Most Muslims disapprove of terrorism; they believe killing innocent people is a sin. Most Muslims won't riot over cartoons or criticism of their religion, but many advocate censorship of such works. Many Muslims endorse the prohibition on ceasing to be a Muslim, even if they don't support killing those who try. We should not treat all Muslims as terrorists, but we need to press all Muslims to respect the human rights of people who disagree with them.

Just as Nixon's men hoped to personally discredit Daniel Ellsberg with stolen psychiatrist's notes, the US tries to personally discredit Julian Assange to distract people from the enormity of criminalizing journalism.

Nixon wanted to prosecute Ellsberg, too.

The Vatican wants to prosecute Gianluigi Nuzzi, the journalist who published leaked Vatican letters that reveal apparent cronyism and financial misdeeds.

Birth control chemicals coming untouched through sewage treatment plants interfere with the sexual maturation of fish, and can cause populations to shrink or disappear. Profitable drug companies don't want to pay to clean this up.

The US ambassador to Australia claims the US "is not interested" in Julian Assange, and that having him in Sweden would not help the US extradite him anyway. Assange's supporters present arguments that this is false.

Parts of the ambassador's statements seem like potential weasel-words: "There is no such thing as a secret warrant" may be true, but there may still be a secret indictment which could be used later to get a non-secret warrant.

It is also possible that the ambassador was intentionally given false information. That is a common tactic of governments. It would be interesting to ask the ambassador if he will resign in protest if that Assange is sent to Sweden and the US then asks to extradite him.

Obama would be ultimately responsible for lying to the ambassador, but he is proud of lying and weaseling.

The IEA says fracking according to the rules it recommends would lead to
disastrous global heating. But it buried that in page 91, and the mainstream media have ignored the point — presenting these rules as if they were a solution.

The bureaucrats meeting to discuss inadequate plans, and not admitting that they still lead to disaster.

The term "technocrat" used in that article is misleading because it implies that technology motivates the decisions. If our politicians were really technocrats, we would probably see a solution being implemented. But they are something much worse than technocrats: they are sellouts to the companies that profit by keeping humanity on the path to disaster.

That article proposes that we lead from below with our own projects. As was recently pointed out, such actions cannot address the problem, because the relentless logic of the market will push emissions elsewhere. Only political policy changes can reduce total emissions. However, local projects might be a way to create the political motivation for the policy changes we need.

Meanwhile, how about putting banksters on trial for attempted negligent mass homicide?

Campaigners in the UK for laws to impede tobacco marketing are receiving threats from irrational tobacco proponents.

The laws being considered would not interfere with buying or selling cigarettes, they would only interfere with the marketing methods used to hook new smokers. Thus, smokers have no reason to object to them. Only the tobacco companies have a reason to object.

I therefore suspect the people making these threats have been indirectly encouraged or funded by the tobacco companies.

The French Internet surveillance systems company Amesys is being investigated in France for supplying surveillance machines to Gaddafi.
Similar machines were installed in Tunisia, which is why I participated in an exorcism at Bull headquarters there. Amesys did not belong to Bull when those machines were installed, but I'm told Bull did the installation. This system in Tunisia is still operating.

There's nothing wrong with deciding about abortion based on the sex of the fetus. Women should be free to do that. The prejudice against women in some societies is nasty and foolish, but that's no reason to restrict abortion rights.

I have to acknowledge that most people should not have put their money in what is effectively a stock mutual fund. They, like many others, made the assumption that stocks go up and not down. However, I suspect the banks encouraged them to make this assumption and the state probably did nothing to stop them, so the principal responsibility lies with them.

While the continued imprisonment without trial is the greatest evil, giving Gazan prisoners fewer and shorter family visits than other Palestinian prisoners is the epitome of nastiness, because there is no plausible motive for it except malice.

Of course, the price of the gas won't include the cost of polluted water supplies and sick people. Worse, it won't take account of the certainty of global disaster due to global heating, until it is too late to avoid that.

The disaster released a tremendous amount of radioactive material into an even more tremendous ocean. The density in the water is tiny, but living organisms concentrate it. The amount in these tuna is not dangerous, but each species is a different case, so all the species people eat may need to be tested.

The Supreme Court decision which permitted this reflects the right-wing composition of the court, which is in favor of companies against people. Does anyone know whether the proposed amendment that human rights don't apply to corporations would reverse this decision?

Ms Woodhouse insulted people with no grounds, which is nasty as well as foolish. She also expressed naive political views. For instance, she condemns other Britons for using some of the insufficient public housing instead of condemning the government for allowing public housing to become scarce.

But that is no grounds for jailing someone. Imprisoning people for their opinions is tyranny.

To value a tropical forest at 30 million dollars can help protect the environment if it convinces the wealthy world to pay a million dollars a year to preserve the forest. But if that means allowing the wealthy world to pay 30 million to buy the forest and destroy it, it is does harm.

The idea of dividing up the total value of forests among the existing forest area is misguided because, if we lose half the existing forest, the remaining half will be even more precious than it is now.

The real difference between state-imposed poverty in North Korea and South Korea is great, but South Korean TV shows might give an exaggerated picture if they follow the same practice as the US: "ordinary" people on TV live in houses that are too expensive for ordinary Americans.

I suspect this is no coincidence. Subcontracting is the
consequence of business globalization, and business globalization was
intentionally constructed by treaties and other state policies that
were designed to favor business. Business got what it wanted, and
what it wanted was to push production into sweatshops.

The fragmentation of subcontracting does harm in other ways, too.
For instance, it interferes with pressuring manufacturers to
sell machines that we can support with free software.

I think the remedy is to undo the policy changes and treaties that
created this system of manufacturing. We should not allow businesses
to make workers in the US, China and Vietnam compete on pay.

The European austerity pact requires countries to reduce the ratio of debt to GDP each year. To try to do this by paying back the debt is hopeless, since that implies a spending cut which reduces GDP and increases that ratio.

I think this demonstrates the danger of media concentration. Future politicians will follow the same path as long as the Murdoch empire (or its successor) has so much power. They will simply find cleverer ways to disguise it.

This article confusingly treats "intellectual property" as a synonym for patents. That term should never be used because it spreads confusion.

Nortel got these patents "for defense", but they are being used for parasitism. If you work for a company that asks you to apply for patents "for defense", demand a deal like the one Twitter recently began offering, which promises to use them only for defense.

Rich Arab countries are trying to arm Syrian rebels, with US help, and they provoke Assad's army into responding with massacres.

This does not excuse the massacres; Assad and his men are responsible for what they do, and Assad's family members seem to be personally involved. But it does mean that the rebels are playing with civilians lives.

The article says "it is thought" that jihadis are responsible for the May 10 bombing in Damascus, but those who think this must not have paid attention to the defectors who say it was Assad's false flag operation.

The Taliban kill civilians too, even more of them, but Afghans resent the US bombings more. Why this bias? Why don't the killings of civilians by the Taliban make Afghans support Karzai?

Or perhaps the Taliban kill selected civilians that they suspect of collaborating with Karzai and NATO, and that gives civilians a way to be safe from them. But there is no way to be safe from NATO since it kills civilians randomly.

I don't know the answer, but it's clear that Karzai's lack of real loyalty is an important part of it. And that is why the US can't win in Afghanistan. It can only prop Karzai up.

The US government has dragged its heels in searching its files for evidence that might help Bradley Manning in his trial.

I don't think the trial can go forward without doing this, so why delay? Perhaps the government wants to delay the result of the trial. Perhaps till after the presidential election? That might make sense, but the trial was not expected to end before the election anyway. Thus, I can't see a plausible answer to this question.

One of the comments is from another person who uses an insulin pump,
who wrote, "I have an insulin pump, and twice I have had to go through
security with it, both times when I insisted on a manual inspection of
my insulin supplies and a pat down due to my pump I was refused".

This is supposed to teach them the right attitude to hold a job. That would make sense if the UK had lots of jobs offers but nobody ready and able to fill them. However, it does nothing about the real problem, which is a lack of job offers. It could even make that worse, since the companies that get work done for nothing might otherwise have hired people to do part of that work.

So it's simply a way of blaming and attacking the victims of austerity, while helping business yet again.

50 years after the publication of Silent Spring, we are damaging the environment more than ever, and the industrial forces that tried to smear Rachel Carson have more political power over our governments than they did then.

I find it implausible that Iran would brave so much pressure and sanctions to do its own uranium enrichment if it didn't have something to do with making nuclear weapons. However, I'm persuaded by reports already cited here that Iran is not yet trying to build them, and the idea that Iran aims to be ready to design and build them and stop there seems like a plausible interpretation.

Genetically modified organisms are not inherently bad. They can have biological harmful effects, but that is not inevitable. However, if farmers cannot freely breed them, they trample the farmers' rights, and that is what eliminates biodiversity. The cost of buying seed plus the chemicals they need puts farmers in danger of going broke and losing their land.

A whistleblower says one of the companies to which the UK is privatizing NHS operations has lied about its services.

Although the UK is not privatizing the NHS as such, contracting its operations to companies is still a form of privatization. Privatizing government operations, when it does not result in competition for the end user, is wrong in general.

The privatizers claim that businesses will increase efficiency, but in practice their profit usually comes from skimping on service, from charging more, from shafting the employees, or from fraud.

Such privatization is therefore a form of corruption, and when it has been done, it must be reversed.

The US-backed coup-installed government of Honduras said it was investigating the shooting that killed or wounded 8 boat passengers, but they don't seem to have tried very hard, since they didn't find the wounded passengers in the hospital.

What's needed is to take global actions that will reduce the total emissions.

That writer proposes the global action of sequestering as much CO2 as is emitted. That's one way to do it (though it wouldn't cover methane emissions, which also contribute to global heating), but as far as I know such sequestration is only in its experimental stages.

A sufficiently high tax on greenhouse gas emissions could also do the job. The money could be spent on sequestration if and when that technology is ready, but it would discourage consumption right away.

Cap-and-trade could do it too, if the system is set up so as to first limit and later reduce the net allowed emissions. Anyone doing sequestration could sell emission credits, and the eventual result would fairly similar in practice to what the writer proposed: most activities doing emissions would have to buy emission credit from sequestration.

Unfortunately, international negotiations about ending global heating have once again failed, apparently because the governments did not really want a deal.

The Senate Armed Service Committee voted to spend $90 million on tanks that the army does not need.

The stated purpose is to keep the plant open, but the army doesn't want to buy any more. So why not close the plant? It's not as if the US faced a threat of attack from a powerful tank army. This is only a cover reason, of course, but it's interesting that such a flimsy one is considered sufficient.

New York thugs tried to frame journalist student Alexander Arbuckle, who filmed a protest to document how professional and law-abiding the thugs were. He has been acquitted after presenting proof that the thugs lied.

I hope Arbuckle's exposure to the dark side of the thug has taught him not to think positively of them.

Meanwhile, where are the prosecutions for perjury? The thugs will continue what they called "testilying" until they cease to enjoy impunity when they lie.

Murder by treaty: as Bayer sues to block India's compulsory license for a cancer drug, Obama is trying to make the TPP forbid that practice.

The WTO is also murder by treaty; the US used it to make India to change its old, wise patent law, which allowed patenting improved methods to make drugs but did not allow patenting drugs. This encouraged the sort of research that India and other poor countries really need.

The African farmers may go broke as many Indian farmers did. I expect the result will be that megacorporations buy their land. Instead of killing themselves, as the destitute Indian farmers do, these destitute farmers might pick up guns and fight back.

Azerbaijan also preemptively arrested opposition leaders in advance, but instead of calling them “terrorists” as in Chicago, it just gave one of them a fine for “disobeying thugs' orders”, which is also a common excuse in the US for punishing protesters and halting protests.

US citizens: phone your senators to oppose S.1100, the hypocritically
named "Keeping Politics out of Federal Contracting Act", which would ban the president from requiring federal contractors to disclose their spending on electioneering.

Obama has not done this, despite many requests. This reflects the
fact that he's on their side. But people are trying to pressure
him to do it, so we need to keep Congress from blocking it.

PBS sold Chick-fil-A the right to use a PBS kids' show to market food to kids.

I am not surprised that PBS did this, because it has no principled stand on the matter. (Neither does NPR, even though it has not gone as far down the path of sellout.)

An organization that wants to get funds from companies and not be corrupted must draw a line and refuse to cross it. For the FSF, the line is that we will never present a nonfree program as a solution to any problem. Nonfree programs are the problem, not the solution.

The violence in Yemen must be understood against the background of a food shortage in which 10 million people don't have enough to eat.

It seems that this food shortage is permanent: Yemen cannot feed its population. The global price of food is likely to keep increasing (because of global heating, soil exhaustion, and other excesses of human activity), so the problem won't go away. A long-term solution must include birth reduction, to bring Yemen's population down to the number the country can support.

People who cannot feed their families should not have more children. It is inhumane to stand aside and let them starve, but it is self-defeating to help them make the problem bigger.

This suggests making the offer, "We will feed you for the rest of your life if you get sterilized now, but if you want to have children you're on your own."

What's amazing is the idea that there is something misguided about that judgment. Imagine a person on trial for shooting someone who argued, in court, "It's ok that I shot him, because at that point I hadn't shot anyone for many hours."

While I agree with the EFF that this should not be illegal, but I see something that might make it ethically unacceptable. Does the service use DRM to communicate with the user? That should be illegal.

The reason that campaign was wrong is that it spread distrust of vaccination campaigns. That could impede the eradication of polio, since one of the few remaining areas where polio is endemic is in Pakistan/Afghanistan.

However, 33 years in prison is too much. It smacks of endorsing al Qa'ida, and Pakistan cannot do that and present itself as being in the right.

I don't think a person can honestly claim to have swum across any particular body of water if he gets onto a boat sometimes. The only honest way to do this feat would be if you stay in the water all the way across. That might be difficult, even impossible without some better methods for resting. Being difficult is the point.

Bassem al-Tamimi, organizer of nonviolent protests, was convicted by an Israeli court based on evidence coerced from a 15-year-old.

Unjust governments occasionally admit they have imprisoned someone for political opposition, when they don't see a need to deny that they are tyrannical regimes. But more often they do wish to keep up the pretense. So instead of imprisoning someone for opposition, they fabricate evidence to convict the dissident of what pretends to be uncontroversially criminal. In Chicago, now, it's "terrorism".

This relates to John Holt's criticism of the compulsory public school as a sort of prison that crushes the spirit. (See How Children Fail, which may still be on sale from the organization he founded. Don't buy it from amazon!)

I had a small taste of it in a public high school, in an advanced
placement history course. But that was the rare exception, even in
New York City.

I disagree with Godin on one side point which I think is worth
mentioning. Godin argues that since manufacturing and mass activity
jobs have mostly moved out of America, and those that remain are lousy
hourly pay jobs, people should all aim for the sort of job that calls
for creativity.

Society could benefit from more people ready to be creative, and if
you're like me you will want work of that kind. But not everyone has
the talent for this, not everyone wants to do it, and a lot of the
work that's needed isn't creative. So if everyone did look for
creative jobs, only a fraction could get them. That is a solution for
some, but not for all.

I think society needs to be arranged so that the people who can't do
creative work can have a decent life too.

Alas, the article mentions the Khan Academy, which makes available
nonfree educational videos on a site that uses Flash.

The article uses the confusing term “intellectual property”, but without attributing it to Cerf. I wonder if Cerf stuck to clear terms such as "copyright" to avoid confusing unrelated laws, and the blogger undid that effort.

I agree that Anonymous should not use attacks — but that term should not include virtual protests ("DDOS attacks") or graffiti ("web site defacement").

A study of 2,000 people convicted in the US and later proved innocent includes over 1,000 that were framed by thugs who planted drugs or weapons on them. However, for the rest, erroneous eyewitness identifications are common causes of conviction.

It is hard for people to reliably recognize anyone they saw for a short time but don't know.

The US is spending billions to build an antimissile system on the West Coast to defend against hypothetical future North Korean nuclear missiles. Now Republicans want to build another such system on the East Coast for hypothetical future Iranian nuclear missiles.

The Hondurans who run the boat that was shot from helicopters say that their boat was, in effect, a river bus.

It's conceivable that one of the passengers had some drugs, just as on any bus in the US. Now imagine if the DEA shot at a bus with helicopters because there were reports that someone on the bus was carrying drugs.

They don't do this yet in the US, but in a few more years of increasing police state, it might happen.

The regime's claim that al Qa'ida is operating in Syria was blown to shreds by the defectors who reported how the regime set up a false flag operation to look like al Qa'ida.

To undo the sectarian aspect that Assad has injected will be harder.
However, if this means Syria must choose between oppression of the
Alawite minority and oppression of the Sunny majority, the former is
less bad. And it might be possible eventually to reconcile the
groups.

The big obstacle to aiding the rebels is that they are not militarily
in a position to be helped to win.

I call it the Heatland Institute because it has little heart, but wants to subject the Earth to lots of heat.

The Illinois Coal Association and the Heritage Foundation have taken up where previous donors left off. Now it will be possible to criticize those organizations for the billboard which they have effectively endorsed.

An investigation of Peter Gleick's published Heatland internal documents found that he did not (as alleged by Heatland) falsify anything.

I am not a great fan of her music, though I appreciate her hacker spirit. The article leads me to think that this song is a cheap attempt at shocking people (but I can't say I am sure of that; I have not heard it). But even if that's all it is, censoring it is wrong.

Laws punishing "insulting religion" are pure and simple injustice. So are laws punishing racial insults. It is foolish and sometimes nasty to judge someone else by her race, but people should not be imprisoned for folly or even nastiness.

The Dallas round of negotiations over the TPP (Trade Privilege Punishment?) agreement was another backroom deal, clearly intended to serve megacorporations.

If the TPP indeed has an "IP" chapter, its most basic error would be the use of the propaganda term "intellectual property", which frames whatever issues it is applied to in a confusing way favorable to the benificiaries of various diverse privileges.

I say "if" because, thanks to the secrecy, I don't think we know whether the TPP uses that term.

I am sure the rest of the TPP attacks the public interest in other areas. When a government participates in these negotiations, that indicates it has decided to betray its citizens to the megacorporations. You should only vote for candidates that are opposed to the whole idea.

These people probably know the difference between corporations and legislators, but they are also aware that nowadays the legislators mostly take orders from the corporations. They are resigned to the continuation of this anti-democratic system.

But that is their error. It only continues because they don't rise up and put an end to it.

However, I think that if we are to end it, we must do so beyond the one issue of copyright. If we are to strip the copyright companies of their political power, we need to do the same to other companies.

The idea of democracy, since ancient Athens, is that the non-rich unite to be stronger than the rich and deny the latter any special political power. Democracy today is a hollow shell because it fails to do this. To restore democracy means ending the companies' power.

Once the disaster occurred, there may have been no way they could avoid doing so, since TEPCO was surely not going to have earnings to cover the cost of the work. The conclusion is, if your country allows nuclear power plants to be built, it is going to cost you a lot when something goes wrong.

It looks like natural problems with the previous integrated pest management system for corn created trouble, and Monsanto jumped in to forestall solution within the scheme of integrated pest management.

These are the same companies, I would guess, that will drive thousands of farmers off their land. The profit will go to companies like Monsanto. Thus, this plan is an orwellian scheme to hurt poor Africans disguised as help.

75 US journalists have been arrested since September. Mostly for making recordings of the thugs' actions in public places.

Even though courts and the Justice Department have upheld citizens' right to make recordings of thugs at work, the thugs continue to make bogus threats. I believe the only way to stop them is to prosecute each one.

The more repressive Ethiopia gets, the more aid its government receives.

The Ethiopian state persecutes journalists and political opposition, often calling them "terrorists" and imprisoning them without trial. And it sends armies into other countries. For the US government, what's not to love?

We should distinguish two questions here: whether some sort of intervention can turn a homosexual into a heterosexual, and whether homosexuality constitutes a disorder or problem.

If it were indeed possible to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, that would not imply that homosexuality is a mental disorder. Many conditions that are not disorders can be changed nowadays. It is possible to surgically convert males into females and vice versa, but that does not imply that maleness and femaleness are medical disorders.

Contrariwise, the fact that it isn't possible to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals does not prove homosexuality is not a mental disorder. Paralysis is clearly a disorder, and usually there is no cure for it.

The reason I do not regard homosexuality as a disorder is that there is no objective reason to consider it an impairment, and homosexuals don't consider it one.

Humanity is using 50% more resources than the Earth can sustainably provide. The result is steady degradation, and if it continues, we will find that the resources we want to use are no longer available.

I think Krugman is unfair when he describes anti-austerity Greek politicians as "extremists". First, because they are the new mainstream. Second, because their views simply consist of acting on Krugman's own point.

Uri Avnery: a protest for social justice that renounces politics
thereby renounces the only path towards
achieving its goal.

Avnery says that Israel is sailing toward an iceberg: the effects of
the occupation of Palestine. The world as a whole steers toward the
bigger iceberg, as it were, of global heating. (Please don't mind the
oxymoron.)

To allow many fishing boats but limit each one to catching far less
than it could get is inefficient, both in terms of the effort put into
fishing and the enforceability of the rules. I suggest reducing the
number of fishing boats operating, and fix that number of boats by
assuming each one catches as much as it can using lawful methods.
Then enforcement could focus on illegal methods.

Citizens of Massachusetts: phone your state senator to call
for a vote on S.772, which would endorse a constitutional amendment
to overturn the Corporations United decision that human rights apply to corporations

The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641
and 888-355-3588.

The oil companies' congressional strike force is trying to sink the US
navy's biofuel program.

Some biofuel production is self-defeating because it uses fertilizer (made from petroleum) and scare water to grow the fuel. That is true, for instance, with the ethanol made from corn in the US.
I can't tell
from this article to what extent the navy program is of that kind.

To verify that a search engine really does not track its users would require more than just releasing the source code for the software it normally runs. The problem is that other programs could be placed on the machine to do surveillance.

Simply using a search engine and email run by different companies is a step in the right direction.

This seems like a very bad idea to me. The Syrian rebels can't take an hold a region of Syria. All they can do is start a very bloody urban guerrilla. With better arms they could more often make Assad have recourse to shelling the entire neighborhood to rubble, but they can't actually win.

Strictly speaking, the point that they were searching for mines that wouldn't have been there if the soldiers hadn't been there is not conclusive. That's true of many operations in all wars. For instance, naval ships have anti-aircraft missiles to defend against enemy attack planes, but if the ship weren't there, no planes would attack it. That doesn't mean the anti-aircraft missiles and their crews are pointless. Their job is necessary, given that a war is being fought.

The real question is whether fighting the war is necessary and justified. To justify a war takes a strong reason, which in the case of Iraq never existed, and in the case of Afghanistan does not exist any more.

Oxfam predicts that Colombia's small farms will lose (on the average) 16 of their income or more, due to the free exploitation treaty.

Oxfam says, "They are likely to take up coca cultivation, engross the files of illegal armed groups, or migrate to urban areas to join some 5 million Colombians — over 10 percent of Colombia's total population — forcibly displaced from the countryside over the last 12 years, the great majority of whom live in extreme poverty."

Hugo Chávez can inspire Europe to reject the politics of the 1% as it has done in Latin America. Maybe he has already started to.

Chávez's administration is not good on all fronts. Some opposition candidates have been arbitrarily barred from running (though real opposition candidates do run). Opposition TV stations have been closed, though some of them were inculpated in the coup attempt. There continues to be a lot of corruption in Venezuela, though Chávez did not create it.

These criticisms of Chávez do not invalidate the point that his
economic policies are a better model than the standard right-wing model.

The US kidnaped Khaled el-Masri in Macedonia and took him to Afghanistan for torture. Now the European court of human rights will hear his case.

Condoleezza Rice said any errors would be corrected, but the US has not given him an apology, let alone compensation. Perhaps dumping him in a lonely spot in Albania was the way they meant to correct it.

This calls for more than just abolition of the death penalty. Convicting the wrong person based on such reckless disregard for evidence must not happen again, not even if the sentence is a night in jail.

I have never called anyone a "cunt" because that implies that the
person's flaws are based essentially in femaleness. It would never
occur to me to say that, because I don't think of either bad or good
personal characteristics as inherently linked with gender. Use of the
word suggests this man was not thinking very clearly about his
criticism

That's if indeed it was meant as a criticism. Maybe it wasn't; it
appears he did not intend that people would know who he was talking
about.

But even if he had stated the person's name, that is still no excuse
for punishing anyone. UK law gives prudes a chance to go on a power
trip trampling human rights.

When the article says "nonprofit", read "tax-exempt". Anyone can
set up a nonprofit corporation; the IRS is not involved in that.
However, IRS approval is required to get the 501(c)(3) tax exemption
that they aim for.

The world's leading scientific institutions say there are three "global dilemmas": growing demands for water and energy, natural disasters, and carbon dioxide emissions. Behind the growing demands is growing population together with ascent out of poverty. We don't want to keep people in poverty, so we must reduce the population growth.

A Moroccan musician whose song rebuked the thugs' corruption faces imprisonment on charges of insulting the thugs, and for "showing contempt" for the state. Any state which does this deserves worse than contempt.

There is no doubt about this verdict, since Bush has confessed. However, it was wrong to try them in absentia; trial in absentia is fundamentally unjust. Malaysia should have put out an arrest warrant for them, but not go further until it had them in custody.

A UN effort, spearheaded by Spain, calls for compensating victims of terrorism. For instance, life insurance policies would not be allowed to make exceptions for death due to terrorism.

I agree with this change, but it focuses on a danger that is rather small compared with those of wars of aggression, austerity, crushing democracy, and global heating disaster. The Spanish government is guilty of the second and third of those right now.

Citizens of Portland, OR, oppose the plan to build giant coal export terminals because of the pollution that extracting and shipping it will cause in the US, and the pollution that burning it will cause in China.

I cannot endorse this statement because it uses the confusion-spreading term "IP", treating the term as meaningful. But what about the substance of the issue?

The problem described here is real, no doubt. But I fear that "democratizing" the Internet means, in this case, letting many governments vote about how to treat it, and what would they vote for? Censorship, I think. Censorship on the Internet requires surveillance, so the same vote would be for surveillance.

I don't see a solution for this problem that I would have confidence in.

That is the government that doesn't bestir itself to protect journalists and union organizers from being murdered, perhaps because the murderers are working for the elites that are the government's power base.

Copyright law is already to restrictive and strict, so any proposal to make it more so is going in the wrong direction. We need to legalize sharing and adopt other methods to support artists, such as perhaps my proposal.

The article says that most people polled are concerned that military cuts
would cost jobs, but that's not true. Spending the money in other ways
would support more jobs than spending it on the military, so the result
would be a net increase in jobs.

Tsipras was
unable to form a government, but has held to is opposition
to austerity and refused to join a government that would approve the deal.

This means a new election, and the people — seeing for once a
politician
with the courage to refuse to hammer nails into their coffin — are
flocking to his party.

Professor Keridis represents the position that "What's good for the
banksters is good for Greece" wants a "stable, long-term government"
that can implement even bigger cuts and disregard the public. Such a
government would have to be fascist.

UN guidelines about the use of farmland, fisheries and forests are
intended to promote local food production.

The article was written by a UN official under whose auspices these
guidelines were drawn up. I'd be interested in seeing what criticisms
activists have of these guidelines. However, assuming they are better than
nothing, the question becomes whether the WTO, World Bank and IMF will
pressure countries to do the opposite.

These methods can cope with rain, but most of them are useless against
the rising sea levels due to global heating, except for the floating
communities. For the rest of the city, the only way to defend against
rising seas is with higher dikes. If they really can't do that,
eventually they will have to abandon the city.

In strictly logical terms, the presence of these weapons in Italy or
some other country does not mean the US would necessary use them to
retaliate if that country were attacked, and moving them elsewhere
does not mean the US would necessarily not use them. The two
questions are more or less independent.

I don't think that where these weapons are stored is a very important
question in its own right, so it might as well be negotiated as part
of a nuclear weapons treaty.

The European Environment Agency says that endocrine disruptor
chemicals found in many household products
may be responsible for
cancer, obesity, autism and/or diabetes.
It isn't certain yet. But the agency recommends taking
a cautious approach to the use of these chemicals.

The immediate effect of these attacks is that US troops can't trust
the Afghan troops they are supposed to be working with (and, in some
cases, advising or training).

However, the real significance of these attacks is that they demonstrate
that the Taliban inspire loyalty and Karzai's puppet regime does not.
That is why the US cannot possibly "win" the war in Afghanistan.

These events also confirm that reports of "progress" in strengthening
the Afghan army are bogus. "Just give us another year and we'll get
there", they have said, over and over. A year later they say it again.
That talk is cheap, but the war costs money and lives.

The American public are learning not to believe the liars. But that
won't lead to a pullout until we have congressional candidates willing
to reject the lies.

The article doesn't really say what sort of laws, since it follows
those companies in describing them with the
vague term "IP".
However, I expect that what the RIAA and MPAA want are draconian
copyright laws.

Other companies might want stricter trademark laws, and maybe that is
part of this same campaign; but since copyright law and trademark law
are totally unrelated, it is a mistake to unify those two issues. The
companies lump them together to discourage thoughtful consideration of
either issue. To follow their lead on terminology plays into their
hands.

The
US is not clearly better than China on this score; the US has also
been known to attack family members of targets. For instance, the
Bush forces in Iraq sometimes got their hands on people by taking
family members hostage.

The Netherlands has legislated requirements for network neutrality,
including a requirement that ISPs cannot disconnect a subscriber
except on specific conditions.

This is a great step forward, except that a court has imposed very
broad censorship to block access to the Pirate Bay. The censorship
requires blocking access in a web proxy, and forbids even listing the
names of
unrestricted proxies.

I think it is inaccurate to categorize this as a matter of freedom of
expression. Rather it is a matter of government secrecy. But it
is bad in any case.

Canadian journalists should write articles citing extragovernmental
scientists' reasonable conclusions, then add, "No scientists at the
Department of Pollution Obfuscation expressed disagreement with what
Dr. Independent said." Eventually the state will decide it is better
to let its scientists speak.

US citizens: phone Obama at 202-456-1111 (9am to 5pm Eastern time) and
tell him to fire Ed Demarco, the official blocking adjustment of
mortgages for homeowners whose equity is negative, and prosecuting the
banksters for foreclosure fraud.

The US has acknowledged that a bomb killed one Afghan family, but
never acknowledges the implications of activities that repeatedly
have
such consequences.

It is true that wars generally kill civilians; even with the best
efforts to avoid doing so, it will happen. When soldiers kill a
civilian, it does not necessarily mean that they did something wrong.
Sometimes they made the best decision they could, in a hurry, with
their limited information, and it goes wrong. This is called "moral
bad luck."

It follows that the decision to fight the war is responsible for those
civilian deaths that the soldiers could not reasonably have avoided.
This is why it is wrong to fight a war without a strong
justification.

The jury deadlocked on the Oracle v Google trial,but its verdict is
irrelevant anyway. The all-important
question is whether copyright covers interfaces at all, and the judge
will decide that. I expect that eventually the Supreme Court
will decide it.

The CIA has blocked another attempt to explode an underwear bomb
in an airplane.

It seems clear that the TSA had nothing to do with blocking the
attack. The TSA has never caught a terrorist. Even though there is a
real danger of attacks against airplanes, that doesn't make TSA
security theater necessary (or useful).

Chen Guangcheng's relatives, friends and lawyers are being attacked
by thugs and stopped
from communicating.

I support China's one-child-per-family law. Given how much future
load each child places on the world's limited resources, which are
running scarce already, we must reject the idea that people are
entitled to make as many more people as they wish. Some countries
don't need to take action to reduce birth rates, but China did not
have that good fortune.

Just because a law is necessary,, that doesn't justify enforcing it in
the cruel Chinese manner. I agree with Chen Guangcheng in condemning
that. If Chen Guangcheng opposes the one-child-per-family policy
itself, I disagree with that position, but I defend his right to stand
for it.

As Putin celebrated being "re-elected", the thugs visited cafes where
dissidents gather and arrested
people at random.

Putin does not allow serious opposition in his elections; the
permitted parties were no real challenge. The US has two parties that
can easily win elections, but neither challenges the power of the
banksters.

The in-laws of Sahar Gul, who tortured her to force her into
prostitution, have been convicted and sentenced
to 10 years in
prison.

To establish women's rights in Afghanistan would be a great thing.
This goal is why I supported the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when
it required little bloodshed. But I don't think it justifies the
level of bloodshed that will be required indefinitely to keep Karzai
in power.

Former chief Guantanamo prosecutor Morris Davis condemns the military
kangaroo courts
he was involved in.

Officials say these are preferable for a small group of prisoners.
They fail to say that the preference is so as to conceal how they were
tortured by the US government. Thus, these kangaroo courts are part
and parcel of Obama's policy of covering up torturers.

I am skeptical that this activity will really mean anything in
practice. Electricity is carbon-neutral if generated without burning
carbon fuel. However, what companies more often do is claim to
compensate for their carbon emissions by funding carbon sinks. That
is fine in theory; the problem is that those sinks (such as planting
trees) are not guaranteed to absorb the carbon they are supposed to
compensate for.

Many have proposed this, and it might do some good if
economic decisions take account of that natural capital. For
instance, if corporations that diminish the natural capital are
required to pay for it, they might not do it.

Another advantage of taxing financial transactions, not mentioned in
the article, is that it would make a some short term speculation
unprofitable while doing nothing to discourage long term investment.

Some Egyptian protesters say that people they did not know infiltrated the
latest protest and started throwing stones at soldiers. It is plausible
that the military sent provocateurs; it is a common tactic for the thugs.

The article does not address the question of whether the use of these
genes would spread
patent pollution. If they would, then the work is
not available for ethical use, so the experiment is pointless. If
not, then maybe his arguments are valid.

The changes are bullshit in the first place, fabricated by thugs
as an abuse of their power.

If you are ever on a jury, and thugs testify that a protester
committed a crime, consider the testimony of any number of thugs worth
less than the word of one protester. The thugs are accustomed to
lying in court, and they plan their testimony together.

The term "intellectual property" or "IP" is a uselessly broad
generalization about many disparate laws. The generalization has a
harmful effect on public debate and even on legislation, because it
suggests choosing between simplistic foolish positions such as "for
IP" and "against IP".

The name of the "PRO-IP Act" shows that it is based on this foolish
thinking.

To fix copyright law will require crushing the
political power of the
copyright lobby — in other words, the businesses that wanted to
feed us SOPA. With their nasty practices, they don't deserve to make
one red cent, not even when they do something that isn't itself wrong.

NFL players often sustain repeated brain injuries that subsequently
ruin their lives. The NFL denies this, so some players commit suicide
and donate their brains to science
to help prove it.

I don't even like to watch football because the violence fills me with
revulsion. I wonder how watching such violence — real, not
fictional — affects children and teenagers. To ban fiction is
censorship, but it would be legitimate to regulate football violence
in reality.

The European Union is considering regulating the scrapping of EU
ships, even if it is done outside the EU, for the
sake of workers'
safety.

I am completely in favor of this. Why allow businesses that don't
have proper safety rules to compete in our markets? And while we're
at it, why allow sweatshops to compete?

I don't think it is wrong to employ workers in Bangladesh, or China,
rather than workers in the US or Europe; but it is certainly wrong to
replace safe working conditions and good pay with low-paid dangerous
conditions. If you want to hire Bangladeshis, go ahead as long as
it isn't an excuse for a setback for workers' rights and pay.

I also think the US ought to pay reparations for slavery to the
descendants of slaves. They suffer today from the repercussions of
the policies that denied them fundamental legal rights.

All US slaveowners are long dead, and most Americans today are not
even their descendants. We cannot inherit personal responsibility for
an old evil. However, the US government which denied slaves equal
rights still exists. So do the state governments which until the
1960s had racist laws that denied all Blacks equal rights. These
governments must take responsibility for those acts; they must pay
reparations to the victims and their descendants.

Lincoln High School in Walla Walla has reversed the destructive
trajectory of its district's problem students, by rejecting the cruel
and punitive
spirit of zero tolerance.

Many of these children's suffering could have been predicted in
advance because they were born to problem parents. As an individual,
you can't retroactively choose your parents, but society can influence
how likely various people are to become parents. We need to do more
to encourage these people to have no children, perhaps by paying them
to get sterilized.

The UK government is trying desperately to build nuclear reactors,
but this is running smack into its promise
not to subsidize
them.

The article considers a minimum carbon trade price as a kind of
subsidy for nuclear power, but that is only half true. It is, rather
a kind of subsidy for everything other than fossil fuels. Absent some
other subsidy for nuclear power, I expect businesses to choose to
invest in renewable energy and energy efficiency.

It may be true the final step, the actual killing, was justified if
Chamberlain was attacking his tormentors with a knife. But the whole
dispute was provoked by the thugs. There no excuse for not leaving
him alone when nothing was wrong, or for not allowing him to talk with
his relatives.

Let's think carefully about the thugs' statement that they will "never
run away from an emergency". There was no emergency except the one
they created. In effect, their position is that once they create a
problem they will not let it end. And they had to destroy Kenneth
Chamberlain in order to save him.

The copyright troll is doing something inexcusable under any
circumstances, but others are responsible too. The record company was
negligent, at best, in selling the rights to a troll, and if it did so
without consulting the band, that was abusive treatment of the band.

The band members were wrong in accepting a contract designed to forbid
the public from sharing, but I understand that the record company
pressured them to do it, so I would forgive them if they condemn the
record company strongly enough.

While the state fights against the FARC, who are drug traffickers and
kidnapers, it does little to fight the paramilitaries who are the
worst terrorists in Colombia. That's because they have close ties
to the ruling elite, including former president Alvaro Horrible.

I wish we had a government that only used its powers against criminals
and not against dissidents, a government whose idea of the public
interest were different from "Give that company whatever it wants."

While this is not as bad as some imaginary scenarios, it is bad. We
have no way of predicting how much worse it will get as temperatures
rise even more. Global heating concentrates in the polar regions; the
Earth on average has heated by about 1 degree C, but it's more than
that in Greenland. And further heating will again be worse in
Greenland than the average for the Earth.

I don't think the fact that Osama bin Laden is dead makes any
difference to the situation. There is simply no point propping up
Karzai; that won't change next year, and it won't change in a decade.
So there is no reason to continue the fighting.

The Capitol Switchboard numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.

US citizens: phone your congresscritter to call for withdrawing the
troops from Afghanistan now. Also sign
this petition.

The Capitol Switchboard
numbers are 202-224-3121, 888-818-6641 and 888-355-3588.

I don't think the fact that Osama bin Laden is dead makes any
difference to the situation. There is simply no point propping up
Karzai; that won't change next year, and it won't change in a decade.
So there is no reason to continue the fighting.

Almost 400 US troops have died in Afghanistan since Osama bin Laden
was killed. (I don't know how many Afghan civilians have been killed,
but I'd guess it is more.) These deaths appear to
have been for
nothing.

I can't make sense of the stories about Chen Guangcheng. He left the
US embassy, for unclear reasons but maybe he thought he had a deal
with China, but now he wants
to flee to the US.

It seems the US embassy told him about Chinese threats to harm his
family members.

Passing on information about an enemy's threats is not the same as
making the threats. It looks like Chen had prepared cleverly to
escape from his village and get to Beijing, but was not prepared
to deal with threats of that kind.

One must be prepared to tell hostage-takers, "If you hurt hostages,
the evil will be on your head."

This shows why Hollywood and Obama are determined to force ISPs to
punish
Internet users: by avoiding trials and courts, they can evade
the basic principles of justice that courts are supposed to maintain
(and sometimes do).

The head of the Senate commerce committee seeks information about News
Corp
from the UK.

The company, and Rupert Murdoch in person, have been described by the
UK parliament as unfit — relevant because some of their
broadcasting activities require licenses and companies
must meet that
standard.

The head of the Star of Hope Mission, which says it aims to help the
poor, endorsed a plan to fine anyone in Houston who gives home-cooked
food
to the needy without a permit.

The supposed reason is to prevent unsightly homeless persons from
making commercial properties unattractive. But it seems that part of
the motive is to ensure homeless hungry Americans can't get help
except from churches.

The US Patent Office wants to cancel the practice of publishing patent
applications
after 18 months.

The original purpose of patents in the US was to discourage trade
secrecy. Inventors were offered 17 years of monopoly in exchange for
showing others their technique. This exchange no longer really
occurs, because patent lawyers have worked out how to get broad
patents while concealing the most important knowledge.

Trade secrecy in 1800 was simple: you just didn't tell anyone your
methods. That didn't depend on any government intervention.
Nowadays, information can be distributed massively and still
considered a trade secret, and laws have been passed to help maintain
these secrets. In other words, with one hand the government
facilitates and thus encourages trade secrecy, and with the other hand
it imposes monopolies to reduce the harmful practice of trade
secrecy.

People in Britain will still be able to access the site through
proxies,
and its new data base format is small enough that they may simply
get
copies of it.

I believe that noncommercial redistribution must be legalized, but not
necessarily commercial use of copyrighted works. Because the Pirate
Bay gets money from ads, it can be considered a commercial activity;
it is on the edge of what constitutes commercial. Thus, I don't
necessarily object to shutting down such sites, as long as it is done
with a fair trial.

In 2001, the Taliban were willing to cut their ties with al Qa'ida in
order to have a better relationship with the US. If their position
has changed, why did that happen? Clearly because of the war.

But it has not necessarily changed. This ideological sympathy may
have existed already in the 90s. If that didn't stop the Taliban from
making concessions for peace in 2001, it might not stop them now.

The loopholes that Apple uses would be closed, if not for the
political
power of business. "Free trade" treaties give business increased power
to block such changes, so we must abolish them to break business's power.

A published letter allegedly proves that Gaddafi provided 50 million
euro to Sarkozy's previous
election campaign.

Sarkozy says it is fake, and that is not impossible. However,
his
argument that this must be false because the campaign spent only 20
million is nonsense. Such a donation, if it occurred, would not have
been entered in the campaign's official account books.

It seems like a good idea, but the right way to cut down on wasteful
purchase of clothing is to ensure the people who make it are paid
decent wages. People will buy less, less water and fertilizer will be
used, and the total income of the workers will increase even as the
amount of work they do decreases.

Nothing stands in the way except the subservience of government to
business. The "free trade treaties"
are instruments constructed by subservient governments to carry out
the orders they receive from business; we need to eliminate them, but
they are the instrument, not the cause.

"Fighting terrorism" is an old excuse for fascism. The US-backed
dictatorships in South America in the 1970s said they people they
secretly murdered were "terrorists". This is why "fighting terrorism"
does not justify any special state power over individuals.

The US intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the trickery
involved in finding Osama bin Laden, have fed the
distrust of vaccination
programs there
although irrational suspicion of medicine, also found in the West,
has contribute too.

Al Jazeera has been accused before of slanting some news areas
at the
orders of the Qatari state,
so I don't think this accusation is impossible. What is surprising
is that this happens only rarely, allowing so many issues to be
covered without state-imposed bias.

I don't know what al Akhbar stands for. Maybe it is pro-Syrian.
(Syria has a lot of influence in Lebanon.) But even if that is so,
I think the story is credible.

To require such a small number of people to get a permit for a
peaceful protest is in itself tyranny, and it is clear that the
military are working with the thugs to attack Americans' right to
protest.

Correction about CISPA: the last-minute amendment
didn't make it
worse.
Rather, it replaced dangerous vagueness with dangerous specific powers,
making explicit the danger that was previously only inferred.

The term "intellectual property" spreads confusion every time it is
used. Here's an interesting article
about copyright policy,
with the completely evitable flaw of using "intellectual property"
as a synonym for "copyright". Put that together with another article
which equates "intellectual property" with patent law, and you're
likely
to be totally misled.

The article gains nothing whatsoever from
that term. There was no
reason to use it other than the feeling that (misled) readers expect
it. Misled readers expect it because of articles like this one
that use it. If the article always said "copyright", it would have
been clear and correct.

In a narrow but meaningless sense, this search was necessary. I
wouldn't put it past a terrorist to hide a knife on his daughter. For
thorough security, little girls must be searched.

In a broader sense, there is no reason to worry about the weapons that
could be hidden on a little girl. Bringing a knife on the plane would
gain a terrorist nothing: he couldn't do more harm with it in an
airplane than he could do on the street.

On Israel's independence day, a small group of activists held a
discussion criticizing the expulsion of Arabs in 1948. Thugs stopped
them from leaving the building,
and arrested one of them for
speaking.

I see nothing to criticize in the FBI's methods in getting evidence
against Cafferty. It steered well clear of entrapment. The
characters in its nonexistent videos were described as unambiguously
children, not stretching that term to the postpuberal. My
only objection is to the idea that people should be imprisoned for
having a collection of images based on what subject matter they
depict.

And it seems to me that the FBI could just as easily to apply the same
methods to prosecute people interested in any other kind of material.
Material from Wikileaks, for instance.

Billionaire Polluter told the public that the flow rate of oil from
the Big Spill was irrelevant to stopping the leak, and that the "top
kill" was working, although engineers
were telling the company
otherwise.

Germany has used copyright to suppress publication of Mein Kampf. The
copyright will expire soon, so Germany is considering a more ethical
way to combat Hitler's racism:
explaining why it is wrong.

I hope the copyright industry won't push to extend copyright
world-wide just so that Mein Kampf can be further suppressed. There
is no limit to how small a tail the copyright industry will try to wag
the dog with.

It is noteworthy that the states reasons would evaporate if
neighboring countries were to adopt the same policy that the
Netherlands has had for decades. The cause of the supposed problem is
therefore the prohibition in those other countries.

The Cambodian soldier who killed Chut Wutty
is dead. Supposedly he shot himself when he realized what he had done.

I am skeptical that a soldier who helped protect illegal loggers felt
remorse about killing an environmentalist. If the soldier was in fact
shot dead, I suspect he was killed or coerced by other soldiers, in
order to make him the fall guy and protect his commanders from blame.

He rejected it despite his confused support for the bogus concept of
"intellectual property". In the specific issue of ACTA, that is a
good sign. However, the monster is not dead yet; Europeans still need
to support the organizations that fight against ratification of ACTA.

Meanwhile, the fact that he gives credence to the confused concept of
"intellectual property"
— and, worse, support for the idea of enforcing "it" more
— suggests he might be disposed to support some other unjust
measure for copyright enforcement, and wouldn't even know how to
separate that issue from other unrelated laws and their unrelated
issues.

The Harvard libraries have created a stir with a cry of distress about
restricted scientific publishing. However, their recommendations are
still timid. Michael Eisen shows
what a really strong stand would
look like.

The TSA outdid itself, subjecting a married couple of
age 85 and 95,
in wheelchairs, to multiple feel-ups, and making them put $300 in cash
in the bin, from which it was stolen, and then the TSA rejected
responsibility.

If TSA searches did a necessary job, perhaps one could argue that
every system goes wrong sometimes and this is the price we must pay
for safety. However, all we buy with this price is a ticket to
security theater, and we'd rather skip the show.

If this is true, they seek to use the irrational prejudice against
women who abort a fetus because of its sex. There is nothing wrong
with choosing on that basis.

In some cases, the motive for such a choice might be prejudice against
females. There are other possible motives — someone might feel,
"I have a boy/girl so now I want a girl/boy." If the motive is
prejudice, it is foolish and could hurt people's feelings, but women
are entitled to abortions for whatever reason.

Anyone imprisoned without a fair trial deserves a "get out of jail
free" card. The Palestinians arbitrarily imprisoned have not found
that. What they have discovered is a chance of getting out
by maintaining a hunger strike for months, which causes severe bodily
damage, perhaps irreparable.

Extracting that oil will inevitably cause disaster due to global
heating, and it is well known which areas of the world are going to
suffer the disaster first. (They are typically coastal or arid.) The
people in those areas can morally justify sabotaging these pipelines
based on the necessity defense. It might even prevail in court, if
the judge is sincerely concerned about justice.

One point in this article is strangely confused. Why would anyone
dream that the failure to stop global heating is due to democracy, and
propose eliminating democracy as a "solution"? Everyone should know
that the nondemocratic political power of business is directly tied to
the failure to stop global heating; oil companies fund global heating
denialists and arrange for mainstream media to pay attention to them.
That the corrective to plutocracy is democracy should not be
countintuitive.

The UK's latest plan
to help poor countries reduce carbon emissions:
give them $100 million (a drop in the bucket) to build carbon capture
and storage facilities (which have not yet been made to work).

The US government spreads fear
among Americans by asking people to
report anything "suspicious". Many Americans refuse to do this
because they recognize that it is likely to harm innocent people.

Another part of the same point is that they recognize it is very
unlikely to have good consequences.

A nation of informers —
both human and computerized
— is
exactly what the state is developing. Claims to the contrary are
disingenuous if they are not simply lies. State violence is a bigger
threat to American lives than any non-US-affiliated terrorists, and
it permist state bullying that crushes our human rights.

The foundation for these attacks is the fear spread by security
theater and by announcements in our buses and subways. The fear makes
the pretense that this is protecting us seem plausible to too many
gullible Americans. Even many who realize it is bullshit feel obliged
to kowtow to it. We need to stop kowtowing and say we don't want
to be "protected" this way.

The US still allows
feeding cattle brains and other nerve tissue to
various kinds of animals, including chickens whose droppings are then
fed to cattle. Whether this can transmit mad cow disease is not
known.

I am not outraged on principle about feeding chickenshit to cattle. I
don't know whether cattle dislike it; if it is mixed with other
things, they may not notice. However, we had better make sure
it is safe.

I think they are making a mistake by conceding censorship of so-called
"hate speech". Once you tolerate censorship of something, on whatever
grounds, it is hard to object to censorship of anything else that
someone can present as "disgusting" or wrong-headed. Views can
be hateful, but not more hateful than gagging people.

The wells might cause disasters as BP and others have done. If they
avoid this, the oil will boost global heating and melt more ice. The
companies probably think that's great, while tens of millions die of
the consequences.

These two decisions are the right ones. The night raids decision is
right, because Karzai's men in control will reduce the killing and
injury of civilians in those raids. As for the prisons, both
countries abuse prisoners and there is someting to be said for letting
the Afghan government have real sovereignty.

I remain skeptical that Karzai's government can ever stand on its own.
It is corrupt and inspires little loyalty; we never hear of Afghans
who join the Taliban, then shoot the other Taliban soldiers as enemies
of Karzai's government. Thus, I think that any resources, human or
financial, put into propping it up will be wasted. However, with
these two decisions those efforts will do less harm while they
continue.

The
expert is right that copying is not theft, and that people refuse
to consider it so.
However, I am skeptical of the claim he makes when he uses the term
"illegal downloading" too. Downloading copyrighted material is not in
general a crime. Even uploading without authorization is usually not
a crime, though it may grounds for a lawsuit. Unless Australia has a
particularly nasty law about this, his discription is misleading.

One of the nasty things the copyright industry is doing is trying to
make unauthorized copying a crime. The US tried that in ACTA but
had to give it up.

In 10 years, if another mother disobeys orders and goes to comfort her
little child, they will arrest her or even shoot her. SWAT teams
already do that sort of thing, then justify it based on violence in
their imagination. That is the spirit of rigidity and zero tolerance,
which is the spirit of America.

It turns out that these hospitals select the healthier and wealthier
patients, and the doctors make more effort to treat them than they do
similarly ill patients in the other hospitals where they work.

The Japanese government relaxed radioactivity standards for food after
the Fukushima nuclear disaster, so some food stores have set stricter
standards. The government now wants
them to stop doing that.

I don't know whether the revised standards add up to significant
increased danger for people who eat the food. They might have been
hypercautious before.

Meltdowns penetrated the pressure vessels and the containment
structures, releasing radiactive fuel into the ground.

He draws a lesson, too:

If you have to assume something, then you are not prepared.

In particular, redundancy for a certain apparatus — such as,
backup electric generators, or connection to the power grid — is
a useful precaution against random equipment faiures, but inadequate
against systemic problems, since they can make all the similar pieces
of equipment fail at once.

This may relate to the established failure of abstinence-only "sex
education". However, that causes another problem that is more
frequent: it fails to help teenagers who need help to enter the world
of sexual relationships.

Syria has excluded the international press, making it impossible
to check on reports of government attacks. This is why I believe those
reports are generally true, even though some fabrication may occur.
Maybe these monitors will fill the gap.

The race, and the teams that persist in racing give the foolish excuse
that sport is above matters of life or death, and freedom or tyranny,
so it should not be "used for politics". But the reason they won't
stop is that they are being paid. In effect, paid for political
propaganda for Bahrain.

Then they arrested him and pressed false charges. He was actually
prosecuted, but acquitted. Meanwhile, the thug department tried to
bury his complaint.

The article focuses on the point that they apparently did this because
Kennedy-Macfoy is Black. However, I think that the reasons for their
choice of victim are a minor detail. Attacking and framing innocent
people would be no more acceptable if they chose victims at random
with no racial bias, or if they chose people for their political
activities (which they often do).

The thugs will stop terrorizing people when they get properly punished
for doing so. If they don't go to prison for this, it will be a
miscarriage of justice.

The article describes these animals as "mutated", which claims their
DNA
has been altered. However, the article does not report any tests
which might determine if that were so. The deformities could have
been caused during development by the influence of chemicals on the
developmental signaling that generates the animal's body plan.

It is no surprise that animals are missing both eyes and eye
sockets,
because the two probably develop together in response to a single
starting signal at that place in the embryo. If that signal or its
recognition is suppressed at the crucial time, neither the eye nor the
socket will develop.

I find it noteworthy that these defective animals manage to
reach
adulthood in large quantities. Surely they are less able to avoid
predation than healthy animals, so why weren't they eaten? Perhaps
because the predators that would have eaten them are missing or
defective too. In other words, the problem may be more ecologically
extensive than this article shows.

In any case, it seems likely that the Big Spill has damaged fishing
in
the Gulf of Mexico for decades. Obama, true friend of the oil
companies, downplays the damage just as Jindal does.

A few days ago I read a message from the League of Conservation
Voters
endorsing Obama. Obama has authorized undersea oil drilling in the
Arctic, where cleanup would be even harder. I suppose the endorsement
was based on "lesser of the two evils" reasoning, but it did not
express any misgivings about Obama. I can't stomach this "lesser"
evil any more than I could stomach a deformed and dying fish.

I want Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank and the
near-embargo of Gaza. I don't want the Israeli state to "destroy
itself". However, if it continues to crush democracy for the sake of
occupation, it could delegitimize itself completely.

Note the attempt to argue that "EZ-pass and Google know where you are,
so
why care if we track you?" In other words, "There is so much
surveillance now that there's no point objecting to it." Before these
surveillance systems were widely used, they had a different argument:
"You don't have to use them." Thus, according to the perpetrators of
mass surveillance, it's always either too early or too late to raise
the issue.
I think it is legitimate for the state to collect phone location
data
pursuant to a specific warrant signed by a judge. What is
unacceptable is for phone companies to store location info about
phones without already having a warrant.

It is a typical prudish US sex scandal, much ado about nothing.
The only conceivable concern of the government is that it might
lead to blackmail, but that concern only exists if the US government
makes an irrational fuss as it is doing.

If an agent indeed tried to deny a prostitute her pay, that was wrong;
but if that's the issue, they should say so.

Israel promised not to allow new "settlements" in the West Bank, but
winked as new ones were built. Now, facing a court order to dismantle
some of them, the government wants to build other
new colonies to
replace them.

Ex-marine Ross Caputi says he shares the views of Tarek Mehanna
— that Iraqis and Afgans attacking US troops are simply
defending their homelands from occupying armies — and dares
the US to prosecute him too.

I must partially disagree with one of Caputi's side points. It is
true that "jihad" means "struggle" in general, and does not imply it
is against non-Muslims. However, there are Muslims who advocate
trying to conquer the world and impose their dominion over the
non-Muslims. Several countries have trampled human rights in the name
of Islam.

However, that issue is a digression from the main point of the
article. Publishing articles advocating any views, even Muslim world
dominion, is not terrorism.

Most comments in Israel about the officer who smashed a nonviolent
protester in the face with a rifle support the officer. When regrets
are expressed, they are regrets for what this will do to Israel's
image.
They cannot see the injustice of the act.

This reminds me of the Americans who were ready to disapprove of the
costs of the occupation of Iraq but unwilling to question it on moral
grounds.

This makes sense if their goal is to do whatever Netanyahu wants.
He would consider a peaceful resolution of this dispute a disaster,
since it would leave nothing to distract attention away from
Israel's occupation of Palestine.

Many Americans can reduce their federal income tax to zero by working
less, making less money, and doing more things for themselves instead
of paying others to do them.

I am not against taxation on principle: a welfare state requires
taxes. If the US government were using its money for ethical
purposes, which would include some military preparedness along with
helping the poor, research, support for the arts, and other things, I
would not regret paying taxes. But given what the US government is
now, a machine for transferring wealth to the rich, I don't see why
non-rich should not resist in any way they can.

I have proposed for 20 years that employees demand this of their
employers, in some of my speeches on the danger of software patents.
I am very glad to see that a prominent company will set an example.

The approved builder of a UK nuclear power plant demands increased
guarantees
of future income.

Nuclear power plants are so expensive (as well as risky) that none
will be built without tremendous subsidies. And once the state pays
so much, it is unconscionable to allow a private company to walk away
with the results. The UK claims future nuclear plants will get no
subsidy; Obama is proud of these giveaways to business.

The claim that corporations are obligated to place shareholders' gain
above all else is not a law, not a moral principle,
just a right-wing
lie.

Corporate executives may fear they will be replaced if they don't push
the stock price up by the end of the year. They may lack the moral
fibre to disappoint the board or the shareholders, but that is not the
same thing as being legally required or morally obligated to go all out
for their gain.

As Andreas Ias was riding a bicycle with a group of pro-Palestinian
activists near Jericho, an Israeli soldier hit Ias in the face with
his rifle. Nothing unusual about this, but this time
it was caught on
video.

The government says this does not represent the Israeli army.
As readers of these notes are aware, it represents many armies
all too well.

Whichever city "wins" will
suffer as a result
. The effects may extend to the whole country it is in.

If you live in Istanbul, Tokyo or Madrid, better start organizing now
for your city to "lose". Baku and Doha are in countries too
authoritarian to let people organize; paradoxically, it is only in
those countries that the games might do no harm, mainly because the
elites there can do all the harm they wish without an excuse.

Trade secrecy is antisocial; the US patent system supposedly exists
to discourage the practice. To require everyone to disclose all secrets
would be tyranny, but when an activity threatens public health, that is
valid grounds. Companies should be allowed to keep secrets only when
there is no public interest in requiring disclosure.

It will be hard to succeed at this without more democracy and
less censorship.

While I wouldn't put it past a scheming high-level official's wife to
have someone killed, I'd expect her to have enough self control not to
do it personally. It seems more plausible that this is a frame-up,
pinned on Bo's wife for political reasons. Is anyone investigating
the possibiliy that someone else killed Mr. Heywood?

Israel blocked 50 passengers in Ben Gurion airport simply because they
wanted to meet with Palestinians. Hundreds of others were blocked in
Europe based
on obviously false accusations.

Israel's position is that it shouldn't be criticized until it gets as
bad as Syria. Next Putin will say that criticism of Russia's
repression is not allowed because Russia isn't as bad as Iran, and
Obama will say that criticism of US human rights violations is off
limits because it isn't as bad as China.

When the thugs attacked Occupy Wall Street, they smashed all the
laptops of the people they arrested, and claimed it happened by
accident. But the Free Network Foundation's radio tower,
they simply
stole.

The Spanish neofascists now in power propose to criminalize various
currently used forms of nonviolent protest in order to "make the
people fear the system more". These include:

Passive resistance, which would be considered an "attack against
authority" and equated with terrorism.

Messages calling for resistance that "affects public order" would be
considered "organized crime". These could include any protests that
the government wasn't notified about in advance. Any or all
participants in a protest of the indignados could be imprisoned.

"Intimidating behavior" would be treated as "violent attacks" against
the suppression forces. The thugs often lie and say protesters
attacked them, but video can prove they were lying. However,
"intimidation" can be very subtle; if thugs fabricate such charges
it will be impossible to prove they are lying.

Protesting inside any public establishment would be penalized
additionally as well.

Such a statement, in Kuwait, could be aimed at stirring up
intersectarian hatred and persecution of Shi'ites. I think that is a
bad thing to do, and I hope it fails; but making it a crime to state
such a claim is directly injust.

Daniel Davis exposed how the US is pretending that the war in
Afghanistan is a success. The US government can't prosecute him, so
it ignores him and te truth.

200 young Afghans wanted to protest that the government doesn't
respect women's rights, even the right not to be murdered;
but only 30
arrived.
The rest were too scared to show up, or were prevented by their families
from
participating — which proves their point.

I don't agree with all of the article's conclusions. I do not believe
that the Iranian government launched its nuclear program for the sake
of nuclear power plants; however, Iran seems to be willing to offer
concessions on
uranium enrichment now.

Every recession in the US tends to lead to new demands and indignities
on people looking for jobs; employers swamped by applicants grab for
any excuse to reject some of them. These burdens tend to become
permanent, perhaps because the level of unemployment has slowly risen
over the long term.

The idea of buying the friendship of everyone in Afghanistan (or
Vietnam) is interesting partly because that's almost what the US did.
In 2002, it seemed that the war was essentially over and it was time
to fund development projects. Unfortunately they didn't work,
and turned into gifts to a small fraction of Afghans.

Uri Avnery: Gunter Grass's criticism of Israeli policy mostly sensible
and partly mistaken, but it wasn't hostile, and Germans should not be
barred from criticizing Israeli policy
because they're German.

US citizens: call on the US
to stop opposing the establishment of
global marine reserves.

Marine reserves not only protect endangered species, they can also increase
the total number of fish available to catch. That is because the mature fish
in the reserve produce young that eventually leave the reserve.

In the US (and maybe elsewhere):
tell companies
to stop supporting ALEC.

Here's the message I gave:

Americans are waking up to how ALEC-promoted unjust laws endanger
their rights, their well-being and even their lives. If you fund
ALEC, we will consider you to blame for what ALEC does. Please cut
off your support to ALEC forthwith.

In the US: tell NPR and PBS
to reject political attack ads
even though the law requiring to do so was just struck down.

Of course, NPR and PBS should not run any ads. They don't
admit they run ads; they call their ads "enhanced underwriting". I
decided to support the petition nonetheless because the petition calls
them "ads", and thus also works against the pretense.

I think it will relent when those airlines face fines or exclusion
from flying to Europe.

What is significant here is only that India has declared its
opposition to curbing global heating. When Indian officials say that
they won't agree to a deal to achieve that goal unless this tax is
cancelled, in effect they say they won't agree to any plan that is
effective. That puts them in the planet-roaster camp, with the US.

The opposition is dishonest, pretehding that this discouragement to
marketing is a prohibition of tobacco. I would oppose prohibition of
tobacco, dangerous and harmful as that drug is, but prohibition is not
the policy being proposed.

The real obstacle to this may be from free exploitation treaties.
Uruguay and Australia have tried partial measures along the same lines
and have been attacked for it this way.

Thanks to Clinton's "welfare reform", aid to poor children is at the
lowest level in 50 years,
while poverty spreads.

I disagree with the interpretation that Clinton destroyed the Liberal
movement's moral authority. Rather, he betrayed the Liberal movement
and denied it the support of the Democratic Party. It still has the
support of people like me.

Vietnam's new Internet censorship regulations will require users to
give their
real names.

It is not surprising to find such rules in China, and now in Vietnam.
Requiring people to indentify themselves for postings is a tool of
tyranny. I urge people to reject communications platforms such as
Facebook and Google+ which require real names.

Would it be interesting drop several gallons of oil in a few places on
Arctic coasts to measure how much of it remains how long? Spills of
that size must be frequent from ships, so a few artificial ones won't
do grave harm, and we might learn something from them.

Given that CAFTA exists, I will be glad if it can do some good against
for lable rights. However, I doubt it will do enough good to outweigh
the harm done by free exploitation treaties, whose general effect is
to turn every country into a banana republic.

If the US implements the US-Colombia free exploitation treaty, that
would reduce the US' political leverage to improve labor rights
conditions
in Colombia.

However, Obama isn't inclined to use that leverage anyway, since
implementing the treaty would mean disregarding the continued murders
of unionists. Apparently he intended this party of the treaty as a
false promise, to be ignored once it convinced the US Congress to vote
for the treaty.

I don't see anything wrong, in general, with diaspora Jews' sending
money to help Israeli Jews live better. And one can ask why diaspora
Palestinians (and other Arabs) don't provide such donations to poor
Palestinians in the Jordan Valley. However, it would take tremendous
sums to compensate materially for the effects of the denial of land
and water, and no amount of money could make up for the tight
restrictions on construction.

Facebook "apps" that some persons run get
access to everything their
"friends" make visible to them, and may hand all that info to a company.

While this article shows that there is currently a way to turn that
off, I expect that Facebook will take any necessary steps to ensure
that most users don't do so. The purpose of those apps is to get
access to that data, and I'm pretty sure that benefit figures, to
Facebook's advantage, into the financial arrangements between the app
developer and Facebook. Facebook will make sure it does not lose that
advantage.

The British acquiescence in this demand is a remarkable display of the
"special relationship" between the two countries. The usual name for that
relationship is "master-slave".

You should not board an aircraft in the UK, because they use
X-ray
scanners (unsafe!)
and don't allow you the option of feeling you up instead.
This is one more reason to take a train to some other country and
fly from there.

As far as I can see, all he is accused of is stating opinions, which
is supposed to be a human right that we respect whether we agree with
them or not. When the US gets its hand on him, will it accuse him of
something that would honestly constitute terrorism, or will it stretch
the term as it often does?

Looking at the larger issue, the UK's one-extradition treaty with the
US is unjust for two reasons: because it is one-sided and because it
abolishes protections such as dual criminality (the principle that you
will not be extradited for an act that isn't prohibited in the country
where you are).

Ni Yulan defended poor Chinese people who were left homeless for the
Olympic games. The thugs atatcker her so badly she is permanently
disabled, and kept her in an unofficial "black jail" in a hotel. Now
she has been
framed for not paying the hotel.

This line, with a further an extension inside Italy, would make it
just feasible to take a train from Paris to Milan instead of flying.
That will attract many more travellers to use the line. The existing
train line can't possibly achieve that.

Software patents generally do harm because a large software package
needs to combine thousands of ideas. Each time an idea is patented,
the patent is ready to cause a disaster like this one. Some disasters
are bigger than others, but disaster is all they can cause.

It is too bad the article equates patents to "intellectual property".
The author probably felt it was obligatory to use
that fashionable
term.

Even worse, the article speaks of "theft" of this mysterious reified
substance. Patent infringement is not theft; a patent is an
artificial government-imposed monopoly. One of the reasons to reject
the term "intellectual property" for patents is that it leads people
to try to construct strained analogies such as these between patents
and physical property. These analogies are misleading, and they
generally encourage support for stricter patent law. That's another
reason to reject the term.

The propaganda term "copyright theft" is a simple falsehood today, and
always has been: copyright infringement is not theft, and in many
cases is not a crime at all. However, our enemies want to change the
law to match their lie. Apparenltly TPP stands for "Tyrants Punishing
People".

Another point of the TPP would be to apply to patent law a "loser
pays" rule that ACTA applies only to some other laws. I am not sure
whether this is good or bad (does a plaintiff that loses have to pay
the defense legal fees?), but it is silly for a treaty to specify
this.

This reflects a general tendency of the misleading term
"intellectual
property": by generalizing about these unrelated laws, it encourages
making them more similar. It also encourages and paves the way for
one treaty to deal with several of these laws together, as does the
TPP. It is therefore unfortunate when anyone
uses that term.

It is clear this is caused by copyright because the desert begins at
the year when books start to be under copyright today.

How this leads to their unavailability is not self-evident. My guess
is that the hassle of determining who has the rights to an old
copyrighted book, plus the risk of being wrong about the answer, plus
the difficulty of negotiating with heirs who imagine their titles are
far more valuable than they really are, have combined to lead
publishers not to even think about reprinting an old copyrighted book,
except for those so successful they were in print not long before.

Prolongued solitary confinement is a form of brainwashing.
Whether Woodfox and Wallace are killers or not, they should
not be subject to an inhumane punishment. Likewise, stopping
prisoners from reading is inhumane.

Prosecutors in the US are
almost never punished, even for causing
grave miscarriages of justice, such as concealing evidence that proved
the innocence of accused people on trial and causing false
convictions.

The author says, "Many prostitution ads on Backpage are placed by
adult women acting on their own without coercion; re not my
concern". But they are the article's concern, since its demand is
that Backpage stop publishing those ads too.

I am in favor of action against anyone that coerces or threatens
prostitutes, but that can be done without harassing other prostitutes.

Confirmation that Judge Garzón was singled out unfairly by the
Spanish Supreme Court.
This article (in Spanish)
says that the listening to defendants' discussions with lawyers
was approved by the prosecutor's office following a standard procedure that
other judges have also approved.

Whether or not this policy is just, to punish one judge for doing this
and not criticize the other judges who did it too (let alone change
the policy) shows that the real goal was "Get Garzón".

I am not sure whether there's any legitimate measure by which the
state can give these graduates jobs. (Curbing corruption would help
in the long term.) But even if they are barking up the wrong tree,
they shouldn't be attacked for doing so.

The result is that higher education, for many low-income Americans, is
just a trap.

If someone is in arrears on a loan for a bachelor's degree, it might
be wise to think twice about his prospects before lending him more
money for a Ph.D. Even if he is personally diligent and not to blame
for his unemployment, he might still find no job with a higher degree;
competition is often even stiffer at that level. But that's a
different matter from blocking him from employment or
furthert schooling.

I think this technique, like interception of phone calls, is
legitimate as long as courts keep close control over it —
something we Americans cannot rely on today. However, the
vulnerabilities that make this possible can be exploited by others.

I wonder why Austin offered that subsidy. Did Apple say, "Another
city offered us $20 million; pay us $21 and we will choose Austin
instead"? I have no information about this case, but that is a common
practice, and it has led local and state governments across the US
into spending lots of money on "jobs programs"
that make no sense except
as handouts to business.

The
claim of 500 deaths per year due to people who drive instead of
flying in order to avoid TSA checkpoints is an extrapolation of an
estimate that was made for 3 months in 2002.

I don't think we can extrapolate confidently from ten years ago to
today. People have had time to get used to TSA inspections;
meanwhile, the TSA has made them more inconvenient and offensive than
in 2002.

Besides, that estimate presumes everyone who decided not to go through
airline security drove instead. Surely some took a bus while others
stayed at home. It would not surprise me if the actual number of
extra fatalities due to the TSA were as low as 100 a year or as high
as 1000 a year.

These price fluctuations are annoying because they are unpredictable.
The goverment should take the uncertainty out of the matter by telling
Americans when the price of gasoline will be $5 per gallon (perhaps in
2014), when it will be $6 (perhaps in 2015), when $8 (perhaps in
2017), and so on. And then adjusting the gasoline tax to make prices
follow the schedule.

In other words, this spectacular (though rather unlikely) danger of a
pilot cracking up and crashing a plane is a small consequence of the
large, everyday harm that modern American society does to the
non-rich. The best chance to make sure our flights are safe is Occupy
Wall Street.

Christopher heroically blocked an oil drilling lease auction in order
to protect the shore and the environment, at the price of two years'
imprisonment for himself. Three cheers for Tim Christopher, and shame
on President Obama for not pardoning him.

The US is considering rules to stop hired children from doing certain
kinds of farm work that can be dangerous. These rules would not apply
to children working on their family's farm.

Therefore, some Republicans have introduced the "Preserving s
Family Farms Act" to
block these rules.
Typical Republican dishonesty, to block regulation of employee
working conditions and raise "family farms" as a red herring.

I find Google's argument, "The better to serve you with my dear," to
be an insult to our intelligence. At the same time, I think this is a
secondary issue. Whether or not Google combines all this data, the
FBI can collect it all, keep it for 5 years (under Obama's new
policy),
and combine it. The problem is not that Google combines it too.
The problem is that it is collected at all, by anyone.

With these limits, future coal-fired power plants can only be built if
they promise later to install facilities to capture much of the CO2
emissions — but that is future technology, a chicken that hasn't
hatched. We can't depend on a promise that can only be kept if
technology advances.

Specifically, the
US military trained members of the Mujahideen-e
Khalq, an Iranian opposition group which at the time was on the US
list of designated "terrorist" organizations. Providing any sort
of assistance to a banned group, even advice about how to respect
human rights, is a crime according to the Supreme Court. Providing
military training is unquestionably a crime — so will those
responsible be prosecuted?

The Mujahideen-e Khalq were reported recently to have helped Israel
kill some Iranian nuclear weapons development scientists. That's not
exactly terrorism, but the organization may do terrorism also.

However, the US can't make this so by saying so. To ban organizations
arbitrarily without a trial is tyranny.

However, if the US forces stay in Afghanistan until the day it is
clear the Afghan government won't torture them, that would require
them to stay forever. And the US tortures prisoners too. This
transfer may be the least bad of a bad set of alternatives.

This is good, but this method of resistance can't do the whole job.
In general, the users have much less clout than the site. People who
believe they can't stop using Facebook will be unable to pressure
Facebook this way.

I think we need laws to regulate these Terms of Service, just as laws
regulate landlords' terms of service for leasing an apartment.

With few exceptions that occur rarely, I won't identify myself to any
web site. Since I view web pages by having a server run the
equivalent of wget, I wouldn't be able to fill out these surveys
even if I wanted to. I'm automatically safe — but you are not.

The UK government seeks to adopt legislation to stop courts from
revealing information about US torture practices. It wants to terrify
Britons into supporting that legislation. So it announced that the
CIA refused to give the UK details of a terrorist plot in the UK.

The plot apparently was not carried out. Either it was thwarted
anyway, or it never existed. However, there are more important
points to make here.

Assuming the CIA really did what was reported, that wasn't directly a
matter of concealing torture practices. The CIA could have told the
UK everything relevant about the supposed plot without revealing
anything about torture.

Thus, this refusal was more in the nature of a threat: "change your
laws to protect our torturers, or we will let you down when you need
us." Some special relationship, eh?

That is, if these events really happened as reported. Maybe the CIA
made up the plot so has to create an opportunity for the threat. Or
maybe the UK government, which wants to protect US torturers, made up
the whole story.

The only thing we can be sure of is that this does not excuse
the torturer protection law that the UK government wants.

Bush muzzled the FDA because he didn't want to protect Americans' health
if that would annoy business. Obama continues the practice, perhaps
because he's afraid to do anything Republicans might criticize.

By virtue of being the "national" theater company, it represents the
state. It also endorses the occupation by performing in Israeli
colonies in Palestinian territory. I think therefore that it is
entirely appropriate as a boycott target.

The crucial issue about any such proposal is to ensure that the UK can
be held accountable for complicity in torture by other countries (such
as Pakistan, the US, and formerly Libya) which wink at torture and
protect state torturers.

Rather than changing tax laws to offer "US" companies an incentive to
bring profits to the US without being taxed, the US should change its
tax laws to tax some of those profits anyway. The existing system
does a bad job for the 99%, so there is no reason to cling to it.

His colleague who made a racist insult was not punished at all, while
ordinary citizens have recently been prosecuted for such insults.
Insults must not be a crime, but any public employee who says such
things while carrying out a public function should be fired.

Although the privatization works by selling these homes at subsidized
prices to the people who rent them, they subsequently get sold again
in the regular housing market, and become
useless to the people that
need council housing.
Unless the state builds new council housing to replace what gets
privatized, the result is that poor people once again can't find homes
to rent.

Human activity is unsustainable in many ways: it cannot continue for
very long as it is now. That alone does not imply it is suicidal;
when one resource runs out, we may be able to use another. However,
global heating is more or less suicidal for civilization even if some
humans might hang on in a devastated world.

It is most important to campaign against government surveillance.
However, since the government can take whatever personal data these
companies have collected, they are in effect arms of government
surveillance too.

The thugs said they handcuffed these children to protect themselves,
apparently feeling they were threatened by the children.

These children reportedly fought other kids in ways that endangered
them. Some action was called for to put a stop to that, but there was
no need to make it so cruel.

However, the arrests of other children, for 'rudeness' and a harmless
prank, were totally gratuitous. They simply reflect the general trend
towards rigid cruelty on the part of US thugs and schools. The "zero
tolerance" fad taught them that arresting children is the thing to do.

I might support aiding Syrian rebels if they were in a position to win
and if they were likely to establish a regime better than Assad's.
I have doubts about the latter, because I'm worried that this might lead
to forcing Alawites into exile (and it isn't clear where they could go).
Meanwhile, I see no chance they could win. But they could get
lots of civilians killed.

I don't know whether al-Hashemi was running Sunni death squads, but it
was well known that Shi'ite death squads connected with a major
Shi'ite party were operating in Iraq. I have not heard that al-Maliki
had tried to arrest those Shi'ites. Thus, whether or not al-Hashemi
is guilty as charged, the govermnent's policy is sectarian bias.

Now that prosecutors can't put GPS devices on people's cars without a
warrant, they want to use cell phone location data
without a warrant
instead.

I think it is an injustice even to collect so much data about
everyone. A state that collects massive data about everyone is a
police state. A warrant should be required before the data can be
saved for even a short time.

This reminds me of his denialist response to the Wikileaks cables,
claiming that they were still secret even though they had been
published. And that reminds me in turn of how Dubya's official
rejected "reality-based" thinking.

As regards war and human rights, Obama is not significantly better
than Bush, and I doubt McCain would have been very different either.
I an proud I did not vote for Obama, but that is a rueful kind of
pride when I think of what he and Dubya have done to my country.

Harry Potter e-books have no DRM, but they carry EULAs that teach
children
an antisocial lesson. As of today, the terms include this:

12.3 You may not and may not permit others to do any of the following
things in relation to any book or extract:
§ sell, distribute, loan, share, give or lend the book or extract to
any other person including to your friends (except in the limited
circumstances explained at 12.1 above);
§ print-on-demand or copy or burn the book or extract to a device whose
principal function is to act as a storage device, for example, a CD/DVD
or USB stick;

Facebook together with mobile apps makes it easy to find girls (or
boys) that are currently somewhere near you, and learn a lot about
them before you go meet them.

If Zoe found out that half the men who picked her up in the bar in the
past month had found her through Girls Around Me — rather than
meeting her there by chance — would that bother her? I don't
know, but I see no rational reason why she should think that's worse
than finding her via match.com.

Would it bother her to know some of them told a false story to start a
conversation? I would find it difficult to tell even such a small
lie, but I think most people would shrug it off as insignificant.
("Honey, I have a confession to make. When I met you at the bar, it
was no accident. I just had to meet you.")

However, she might rationally be concerned that someone frightening
will stalk her this way some day. It's not an everyday occurrence,
but it happens at some point to a lot of women.

For aphids to evolve a defense against this, they would need to change
their alarm chemical. I expect that would be difficult. They could
easily evolve to ignore their alarm odor, if the selective pressure
were high enough, but they'd pay a continuing penalty for that so the
net result would still be beneficial.

I would guess that these plants will be pretty safe for wildlife,
since peppermint has not caused an eco-disaster. But that is not
certain. If this is widely adopted, the quantity of peppermint odor
coming from wheat could vastly exceed the quantity that comes from all
the peppermint in the world, and that could have unprecedented effects
on wildlife — which might be disastrous or not. This would have
to be studied.

Meanwhile, if the plants are patented they would attack the rights
of farmers. And if they pollinate across distances, they would
pollute other farms and put them in danger of being sued.

A Black Londoner
has a recording
to prove that a thug called him a
"nigger", after strangling him.

It is an injustice to criminalize stating one's opinions — the
UK's law against racist insults violates the fundamental right of
freedom of speech. However, public employees who make such insults
against members of the public in the course of their work should be
fired, since treating people of all races as persons is part of their
job.

I don't believe people are morally obligated to obey unjust laws, for
instance laws against copying and sharing, or against gay sex, or
against abortion. Some laws are valid; for instance, the law against
murder is an obvious example. But that law is not the reason why
murder is wrong.

However, when state agents break laws, the result is arbitrary rule.
We can't tolerate that.

Although burning gas produces less pollution than burning coal,
fracking adds to the greenhouse gas output and eliminates any advantage.
This is in addition to polluting water supplies.

However, the deeper lesson is about getting close to companies to try
to change their practices: the chances of success are small.

It would not surprise me if the same energy companies that cozied up
to the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations, leading them
to think this would result in passing a climate protection bill, were
also funding lobbying to make that bill fail.

When the 57 countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation were
prepared to offer Israel a peace deal, Hamas tried to kill it with a
terrorist attack. But they went ahead anyway, and it was
Israel that has rejected the offer for 10 years.

Israeli occupation policy is to continue the occupation of Palestine
and
block any long-term solution, because most Israelis like the status quo.
Thus, Israel will not choose between "one state" and "two state"
long-term solutions until international pressure such as sanctions
makes continuing the occupation of Palestine cease to be attractive.

Tel Aviv University Lecturer Anat Matar participated in a quiet solidarity
rally for
hunger-striking prisoner Hanaa Shalabi. Now the university is
going to "investigate" Dr. Matar for this "illegal protest" at the request
of a right-wing group.

It sounds a lot like McCarthyism to me.

If this is what academic freedom means in Israel, Israeli universities
can hardly claim any sympathy against the Palestinian boycott call.
If this is what democraticy means in Israel then there isn't much of it left.

Just banning the trade won't magically end poaching, but it will make
enforcement easier.

I wonder if it would be possible to develop a cheap convincing fake
rhino horn that only laboratory analysis can distinguish from real
rhino horn. All the sellers would sell the fake, and the rhinos would
be safe.

Another idea is to inject a chemical that has harmful effects on
humans into the horns of living rhinos. It would not hurt the rhino
if it stays in the horn. (Of course, this could be verified first.)
If this were done to 10% of the rhinos, it would scare off purchasers.

An undersea well near Britain
is leaking various gases
including
methane and hydrogen sulfide. The gas could poison marine life, and
could even cause explosions.

The engineers can't find where the leak is coming from, so they can't
try to seal it. But the company says we should not worry; the
situation is "stable" and there is no danger. That would be
reassuring, if we could trust them to be honest if that were not the
case.

Shell says it will be safe to drill in the sea near Alaska. That
would be reassuring, if we could trust them to be honest if that were
not the case.

If Brigner's job were managing a factory, perhaps it would not matter
what views he expressed in his previous job. However, I expect his
job will include speaking for the Internet Society, and I don't
believe he can do so and be considered sincere.

Walmart and many other big store brands get their workers through
multiple layers of temporary agencies. They pay these workers
piecework, speed them up on threat of being fired, use up their
bodies,
then fire them
, while paying them peanuts.

These companies should be required by law to take direct responsibility
for everyone working in their plants.

Most articles are mysterious about what this "crime" consisted of
— apparently to keep Britons in ignorance of just what might
land them in jail.
One article shows what he said:

His words are racist and nasty, and I don't agree with them one bit.
But they do not threaten to hurt anyone. They only express hostility.
It is tyranny to imprison people for mere insults no matter what the
details.

The US "state secrets privilege" has been used to stop victims of US
torture from suing, so as to conceal information about how they were
tortured. Now we find it has also been used
to conceal a stupid failure of intelligence
against Afghanistan.

I wonder if that operation, had it been carried out, would have
provided intelligence about the planning of the Sep 11 attacks.

These are indeed good aspects. The bad part of the law is the part
whose validity is being challenged before the Supreme Court: the
requirement to buy insurance from a private insurer. If the law is
invalidated, it will be because of Obama's surrender to those
companies.

I am not sure that sale of kidneys for transplant is a bad thing. And
if it were legal, the sellers might at least get paid. (Though in a
country with high corruption there is always uncertainty about that.)

The US required cities and states to buy, from the banksters, billions
of dollars worth of fixed-rate loans as a hedge against possible high
interest rates. Then the US drove down interest rates to cater to the
banksters, making our cities lose while
the banksters win.

In a society with a labor shortage, this policy would make perfect
sense. If more workers are needed, each person needs to work for more
years. But what's the good of this in a society with high unemployment.

To be dependent on Facebook, or any other specific company you could
not replace with another, is to make yourself vulnerable to unbounded
legal aggression. Don't be a fool — unfriend Facebook today
rather than accept these terms.

As usual, austerity causes a further downturn and makes it harder to
pay the debt, which predictably leads to need for a further "bailout"
and more austerity. It is like putting ice on someone with
hypothermia.

The March heat wave broke thousands of temperature records across the
US,
day after day.

The heat wave is over in Massachusetts, because the weather still
fluctuates. "If you don't like the weather in New England, wait five
minutes", though this time we had to wait a few days. But that doesn't
mean global heating has stopped. There will be more, worse heat waves,
and they will become more frequent. And they will happen in summer
and kill vulnerable people. By ten years from now it will be worse.

Don't let the temporary return of non-extreme weather lull you into
a sense of security.

Note how Sarkozy cites the prohibition of "child pornography" as a
precedent for prohibiting access to a political opinion. The idea
that this was the thin edge of the wedge is no longer just a theory.
It is an excuse for censoring all sorts of things.

No matter how disgusting some works may be, censorship is more
disgusting.

I think it was wrong. If he did not want to stick to the truth, he
should have criticized a fictional company, or said "It would be easy
for XYZ to happen", rather than saying presenting exaggerations as
real events.

I also criticize movies that say "based on a true story" when
they have willfully changed things.

The real facts about Apple products are sufficient reason to refuse
to use them.

What they want is impossible; this cannot be predicted. There are
surely at least 50 people who show such "warning signs" and don't
engage in violence, for each one who does so. It would be tyranny to
imprison them all, and short of that, there is not much that can be
done which wouldn't be worse than the disease.

However, a few measures that might help could be possible. For
instance, he could have been denied permission to have firearms.

The article says he is being kept in an "isolated cell". I hope he is
not getting the same inhumane treatment as Bradley Manning. Bales is
accused of murder, while Manning was heroic whistleblowing, but no
prisoner (whether accused or convicted) should be kept in long-term
solitary confinement.

The proposed pipeline will probably not solve the problem for long.
Global heating will make the American west dry up even more,
so the problem will come back. A solar-powered desalinization plant
is the only sustainable way to keep Las Vegas supplied with water.

There are a couple of points in the article I don't agree with. Even
though the US government generally has a business-related motive for
any action, including an intervention, that doesn't necessarily mean
the action is wrong. On occasion, what's good for US business happens
to be the right thing for other reasons.

Secondly, if the US tries to stamp out a kind of nasty practice in one
place while supporting a government that does the same nasty practice
in another place, that might support the conclusion that the US is
hypocritical, but that doesn't imply that it is wrong in both cases.
It could be doing right in the first case and doing wrong in the
second.

Thus, a US intervention against the LRA could be justified (though it
might also be unnecessary now in Uganda). But that doesn't justify
US support for Uganda's government on other issues.

That page focuses on the minor issue of gasoline prices,
but what's at stake here is avoiding global heating disaster.

Here's the message I used.

The Keystone XL pipeline would be a disaster for the world,
since it would commit to use of a large reservoir of oil that
produces more CO2 than ordinary oil. To use the tar sands oil
would be an act of folly, and if you make the decision to do so,
future generations will hold you resposible.

I think Iran's position was unreasonable. This is a matter of
inspection, not criminal prosecution. I would expect nuclear
facilities and possible nuclear facilities to be inspected repeatedly
like elevators.

This is desirable, but not enough. Another the reason minority groups
and poor people don't vote is that Republicans have taken action to
stop them. And another reason is that there is rarely anyone good to
vote for.

When sites require facebook accounts to post comments, it means
that a person's comments on all sites can be tied together,
which adds up to broad and
intimidating surveillance.

The Internet tends to create near-monopolies, one for each activity.
(Not every activity has developed a near-monopoly yet.) Due to the
weakness of democracy today, these are not regulated like the old
near-monopolies, the phone company and the post office. So they use
their power to worm their way into controlling more and more
activities.

British troops in Afghanistan are restricted in handing prisoners over
to Afghan custody because Karzai's men are likely
to torture
them.

This creates a conundrum about what to do with prisoners when NATO
troops are removed from Afghanistan. They cannot remain permanently
in Afghanistan to guard those prisoners, they cannot take the
prisoners out of Afghanistan, and they cannot hand them over to
Karzai. Some of them are probably prisoners for no good reason,
but not all.

You'd think that fingerprints would be sufficient for the purpose of
verifying that the intended person is being released. So why do they
want iris scans at all? Perhaps so they can track people's movements
on the street. So it is very important to refuse.

Staying in jail longer should be part of the aim of protests where one
gets
arrested. The freedom riders of the 60s aimed to fill the jails to the
bursting point.

The US control of the Internet leads to injustices such as domain name
seizures, but that doesn't mean the ITU would be better. Russia and
China surely don't care about defending netizens from the US
government and its masters in Hollywood. Obama and the US Congress
would love to let the ITU adopt regulations comparable to SOPA, since
then they could say, "We have no choice: the ITU has forced it on us."

For something of very general use, such as pencils or general purpose
computers, it is valid for the manufacturer to argue that it can't
control how purchasers use them. That argument is inapplicable for
surveillance cameras in China because repression is their most
significant use.

The UK has proposed another pointless criminal law against harassment
or violence that drives
someone to suicide.

This law would be ineffective in discouraging those practices. The
perpetrators surely do not expect the victims to kill themselves
(which is a rare event), so they will not worry about being prosecuted
under this law, and thus will not be deterred.

An effective policy would have to address the violence as such, not
just in the rare case where it leads to suicide.

Meanwhile, if Nosheen Azam said she feared being killed, doesn't
that suggest someone else attacked her? That is a crime already,
and this proposed law would not apply.

The corporate-run World Water Forum is the first step in a plan to
privatize the natural world and abolish the
right to water.

If the natural world is privatized, poor people will be compelled to
sell their shares (if they got any in the first place), and then will
have no water. It is one way to do population control, but not a
humane way.

The alleged terror plot is plausible, but the fact that all the
accused participants were shot dead is fishy. It suggests that the
thugs wanted them dead to avoid putting them on trial to demonstrate
their guilt, as the US apparently did with Osama bin Laden.

It is not totally unreasonable to punish actions that risk causing the
birth of a defective child. Unless it is very severely damaged, it
will be a person after it's born, so if it is impaired then, a person
will have been harmed. However, this must be done by laws that
explicitly concern fetuses, not by equating fetuses with children.

I wish them luck — please help if you can — but
eliminating software patents one by one is as useless as trying to
eliminate malaria by swatting mosquitos. Every software patent is a
threat to the field of software, and we need to get rid of them
all at once.

It is not clear from this article why individuals should face charges.
The mere existence of a leak should not be a crime. However, if they
directed workers to take reckless risks like those that led to the Big
Spill, that would justify charges.

The US' failure to charge anyone for the Big Spill simply shows that
Obama is in the oil companies' pockets.

Ravi was charged with "intimidating" the roommate. Hostile teasing is
mean, and people shouldn't do that, but merely insulting someone
should not be a crime. If he made threats, that should be a crime. I
don't know what Ravi actually said.

Given the UK's austerity, these drivers won't be able to buy
insurance. What they will do is arrange for their friends to
buy gasoline for them, which they could then siphon from one car's
tank to another.

The same system spies on everyone, so everyone should object to it.
As for detecting drivers that don't pay, an old-fashioned security
camera whose images are viewed only when there's a reason would
suffice for that.

They used to support Mubarak for his protection. Supporting the oppression
of most people can't be justified, but Muslims must recognize religious
freedom, which includes the freedom to argue for or against any religion.

The thugs in Venezuela have checkpoints all the time on major highways
between cities. They check everyone's papers, regardless of whether
they suspect the people of anything. They don't usually kill, but
often they arrest people demanding fines which are effectively
ransoms/bribes. They even do this to government officials (an
official I know told me this happened to him). The problem is older
than Chavez's presidency.

It is typical of oppressive regimes to attack dissidents protesters
with distracting side issues. When China says that these protests are
encouraged by "supporters of the Dalai Lama", they might as well say
"Tibetans".

Rather than condemn the landless poor to flee in search of a place
that will let them have water, it would be far more humane to
discourage people from giving birth to them. The world needs
subsidized contraception and subsidized sterilization.

By 2050, conventional
pollution is expected to kill 3.5 million people per year.
I say "conventional pollution" because that figure does not count
greenhouse gases and the effects of global heating, which if not
stopped will eventually kill tens of millions per year, but perhaps
not until later than 2050.

It is bullshit to refer to the UN troops as "peacekeepers".
Peacekeepers prevent war from breaking out between two armies. That
was never the case in Haiti. What this UN mission is intended to
prevent is an outbreak of democracy.

Israel won't connect Palestinian villages to the electric grid, so Europeans
funded solar power for them.
Israel plans to demolish the solar panels because they don't have
permits (which Palestinians basically can never get).

I agree with the UN official: the goal of this harrassment, which
extends to many other areas of life, is to drive Palestinians off
their land.

Obama's health care program has provisions that increase costs and
provisions that decrease costs. By considering the former and
ignoring the latter,
Republicans make false attacks.

False statements by Republicans are hardly news in general. What's
really noteworthy is that a national health service, such as most
developed countries have, would save tremendous amounts. Of course,
Republicans oppose that.

This plan, which was arranged by every Internet users's enemy, Obama,
takes advantage of the fact that ISPs are allowed to terminate
anyone's service more or less at will; users have no right to
continued service. That is a general injustice of the Internet today,
and this is just one manifestation of it.

Peat bogs are carbon sinks, so their loss will increase subsequent
global heating too. This means that pledges to restore the land as it
was are bogus (greenwashing), since they do not plan to replace lost bogs.

The biggest problem of the ICC is that the US, since Bush days,
has opposed it and gone all-out to weaken it. This is because Bush
(and Obama I presume) didn't want to be accused there of torture and
other crimes against humanity.

There are reports that the US is
secretly arming the rebel underground. That might be legitimate if they
could win — and if it were clear that most Syrians prefer them to Assad,
something which is not certain. However, if they can't win, arming them only
leads to useless casualties.

International trade benefits every country in terms of increasing its
GNP. But if the country doesn't have a strong democracy, the 1% will
snap up the increase and leave most people with only a cut in pay.
Thus, the arguments for increasing international trade are valid only
so long as it doesn't weaken democracy.

The recent outbreak of fighting in Gaza started when Israel
assassinated two militant leaders, saying they were planning an attack
in Israel, and that they were responsible for a previous attack.
But that seems to be false.

The US and Europe are no longer the main
consumers of oil, and
the other users are much more efficient. This means the US will
need to make radical improvements in efficiency or be priced out
of the market.

If they were looking for an ounce of spilled oil, that would be a
reasonable method to find it. However, if the problem is a hundred
tons of oil broken up into tarballs scattered along miles of
shoreline, they wouldn't need a dog to find them. It would suffice to
dig up any foot of the shore to find some. But they wouldn't pay for
this to be done.

Stating that access to clean water is a human right is vital for
stopping companies from buying up all the water and leaving none for
the poor. At the same time, we cannot eliminate real limits on
resources by proclaiming human rights to use them. If we want fewer
regions of the world to be under water stress in 2050, we must
subsidize and encourage contraception.